


The Joining, Part 3: Reunion

by LadyKate63



Series: The Joining [1]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Drama, F/M, Gen, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-12
Updated: 2007-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyKate63/pseuds/LadyKate63
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 21st Century historian studying the life of Xena, Warrior Princess finds more than she bargained for. A sequel to The Joining Part 1 (Understanding) and The Joining Part 2 (The Test.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **THE JOINING, PART 3**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Xena, Gabrielle, Ares, and other characters from "Xena: Warrior Princess" belong to Renaissance Pictures/MCA-Universal. All other characters in this story are my own. This is a work of not-for-profit fan fiction, written solely for the entertainment of fellow fans; no copyright infringement is intended. The story contains some adult language and sexual situations, and is intended for mature audiences.
> 
> This story takes place in an alternate 2005, in a world where Xena and Gabrielle are well-known historical characters and where modern history has taken a slightly different course (such that, for instance, September 11 and the war in Iraq never happened). Most of the modern-day events mentioned in the story, such as the civil war in the Huandong province of China, are fictional; the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea actually took place in the 1980s.
> 
> I am grateful to my beta readers, Sais2Cool and Tango, for their invaluable help, advice, and occasional slave-driving. I also want to thank my readers for their support, encouragement, and continued interest in this story, which took a long time to complete.

The woman wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders as she watched her husband in the semi-darkness that was tinted orange by the reflected glow of the hearth. She could see that he was drunk, and yet there was a frightening clarity of purpose in his movements, his face, his eyes. He ordered her to get their daughter out of bed.

"Why?" she asked, her blood chilled by foreboding. "What's happening?"

And then he said it: "I'm going to kill her."

She stared at him silently, frozen to the spot. Maybe she whispered, "What?" or maybe she said nothing at all. She wouldn't remember, later.

"She'll make a fitting sacrifice for Ares, God of War."

With that, he picked up a lamp and went outside, into the rain and wind that battered at the shuttered windows. She watched him walk toward the stable. Then she took a step toward the open door. Shivering, either from the cold or from terror, she followed him. When she came inside the stable, he was sharpening his sword. The sound of its sickened her. A man, her husband, methodically preparing for the murder of his own child.

The mother was not going to let this happen. Her eyes fell on the axe that stood in the corner, leaning against the wall. Her legs were shaking when she went to take it, but her hands were steady, though the blade was heavy in her grasp. Her husband never heard her coming. The screech of sword on whetstone was interrupted by another, even more sickening sound, and then it was over. The rainwater washed the blood off the woman's hands and dress as she walked back to the house.

The little girl slept soundly through the night, and knew nothing of what had happened. But it was, unbeknownst to her, a baptism by blood. Perhaps her father didn't fail completely, and she was indeed, on that day, given over to the God of War.

x x x

Lynn stared at the computer screen, sipping nearly cold coffee from her New York University mug, then put down the mug, reached for the phone and dialed. As she waited, she leaned back in her swivel chair, looking absently around her cramped office. A dark-haired, blue-eyed warrior in black leather, with a chakram in her hand, looked on sternly from a wall poster for the 2001 conference of the Ancient History Association, "Xena of Amphipolis: The Hero, The Myth, the History." It was Lynn's only concession to interior decoration, other than a dusty potted plant on top of the file cabinet and a bronze equestrian statuette of the Warrior Princess on one of the bookshelves.

The phone was picked up at the other end, and after a brief silence a muffled voice groaned, "Y-yeah?"

"Jackie?" She skipped the ritual lie exchange: _I hope I didn't wake you. - No, of course not._ It was almost ten o'clock, for heaven's sake. "It's Lynn Doyle."

"Oh - Lynn ... yeah, hold on." There was a rustling in the phone, and then the voice said a little grumpily, "Good morning."

"'Morning. Listen - I read the chapter and - you really need to tone it down."

"You don't like it?" Jackie sounded crestfallen.

"No, it's good, it's just a bit too - melodramatic."

"Lynn!" Now she sounded fully awake. "The man is trying to _murder_ his own child in cold blood as a sacrifice to the God of War. It's a kind of melodramatic situation, don't you think?"

"Yeah, it is - but 'blood chilled by foreboding'? Jackie, really... And besides, you need to curb your imagination."

"What do you mean?"

"Rain, wind - it was a dark and stormy night - how do you know it was raining? It's not like we have weather reports from two thousand years ago..."

There was another short pause. "How do you know it wasn't?"

"Wasn't what?"

"Raining."

"I don't. But you can't just make it up and say it was raining - "

"So what do you want me to say?"

"Nothing! Nothing at all about the weather."

"Then the reader is going to assume that it _wasn't_ raining. You know, by default. How is that different?"

Lynn was stumped. That didn't happen to her much.

"And besides," Jackie pressed her advantage, "I'm trying to create an atmosphere, you know? We - you don't want it to go like this: 'When Xena was seven, her father Atrius came home drunk one night and told her mother Cyrene he was going to kill Xena as a sacrifice to Ares, God of War. When he went to the stable to sharpen his sword, Cyrene followed him, picked up an axe and killed him to protect her daughter.'"

"Okay - that sounds a bit dry."

"It sounds like a report for child welfare."

"Well, all right... The rain can stay. But lose the chilly foreboding, okay? And - " she paused, turning to the screen again - "the baptism by blood. That's a bit much."

"You got it," Jackie said, sounding quite pleased with herself. "I'll send you the rewrite tonight."

After saying good-bye, Lynn hung up and looked pensively at the screen. Suddenly, she realized she was smiling at the memory of how Jackie Lyons had walked into her office for the first time, on an unusually warm March day about a month ago. She was twenty-seven but looked like a teenager - a fresh-faced slender girl with lively grey eyes and hazel-brown hair gathered in a ponytail, in a long, very summery green dress with a pale floral pattern. She had emailed a week earlier, on a literary agent's recommendation, to offer herself as a co-author for Lynn's book about Xena. Her credentials included a popular biography of the French Revolution's celebrated assassin Charlotte Corday, _The Virgin of the Terror_ , and a boundless enthusiasm for all things Xena - so boundless that Lynn half-expected the phone to start jumping up and down when they first spoke.

When Jackie came in, she stopped in the doorway and started to say, "Hi, I'm Jackie - " and then trailed off and looked around, her mouth slightly open, face glowing with curiosity. Her eyes alit on the original 1878 edition of J.J. Bachofen's _Die Kriegerprinzessin von Amphipolis_ , rich brown with faded gilded lettering on the spine - the book that had made Xena a cult figure - and she headed straight for the bookshelf. "Wow. Can I see that?"

"Sure," Lynn said, and for the next few minutes Jackie leafed raptly through the book, inhaling the pungent smell of the yellowed pages, admiring the engravings and the old-style Gothic German letters. Finally she looked up at Lynn, smiling a little sheepishly. "I think I read this book at least twenty times when I was a teenager," she said. "I mean a translation of course - it had these beautiful illustrations - "

She continued until Lynn cut her off: "It's a fun book as long as you don't take it too seriously." Jackie looked so stricken that she felt almost guilty as she explained, "Bachofen was a romantic, not a real historian. He never met a myth he didn't like. The rest of us got saddled with the task of separating those myths from the facts. That's what my book is all about..." Then she paused and for some reason added, " _our_ book" - even though she hadn't even decided yet that she wanted Jackie as her co-author.

Jackie beamed. "Oh, I almost forgot - " she reached into her leather knapsack and pulled out a copy of _The Virgin of the Terror_ , with an idealized, wild-haired Charlotte Corday on the cover - "here's a copy of my book... You probably find it silly, huh? The girl kills just one guy and gets a whole book written about her... ha-ha ... that was a joke." She reddened a little, momentarily flustered by Lynn's unamused stare. "I mean, because you write about Xena and she - well anyway, the book's for you... You know, you kind of look like Xena, has anyone told you that? At least on those Pompeii murals - except that your hair's not as dark and your eyes are grey - well, kind of green - "

"Yeah, I've been told," Lynn said, getting up from her chair. "Come on - let's go have lunch."

They had pasta in a small, noisy Italian place, so crowded that you practically brushed your elbows against the person at the next table, and there Jackie talked about how Xena was her imaginary friend when she was seven ("My mom actually took me to a child psychologist, can you believe that? And the child psychologist kept trying to figure out if I _really_ thought Xena was my best friend...") and about the recent Channel 13 broadcast of Verdi's opera _Amore e Guerra_ ("Okay, so Bryn Terfel isn't my idea of what Ares would look like but wasn't he great? 'Addio Xena' - you know, when she drinks Death's tears and he - oh, you didn't see it? You're kidding! Carol Vaness was a _perfect_ Xena, she even looks - well, I _have_ to give you my videotape!"). None of it was very encouraging; the girl was up to her ears in just the kind of romantic nonsense Lynn had set out to rectify. But somehow, Lynn, who rarely talked to anyone about her childhood, found herself telling Jackie how she got a book of stories from ancient Greek mythology for her eighth birthday, and how, when her father looked in on the birthday party a couple of hours later, he found all the other kids playing and Lynn sitting on a windowsill lost in the book.

And then, somehow, it was settled: Over coffee, Jackie asked if they were going to work on the book together, and Lynn replied that she would have her agent draw up the contract.

" _Really?_ " Jackie laughed with obvious relief. "I was worried that you'd think I was too much of a romantic."

"You are. But - " Lynn almost said "I like you anyway" but caught herself in time - "I like your dedication."

That was how Jackie Lyons had ended up as her co-author on the biography of Xena.

Lynn scrolled down the page and started reading the part where young Xena led the defense of her hometown against an attacking warlord. A hesitant knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She turned to see Carrie, a student from her Xena seminar, fidgeting in the doorway.

"Hi, Professor Doyle?"

Carrie looked like a time-warped refugee from the sixties in her faded tie-dyed T-shirt and brownish knee-length tights, with tattered sandals -which she sometimes took off in class - on her bare feet. She was an art major who had signed up for the seminar after watching the 1972 musical _Xena!_ on television.

"I think I, like, finally have an idea for my term paper?"

"Okay. Have a seat. Tell me."

Carrie sprawled in the chair; Lynn noticed that she had been using her left arm as a notepad again.

"Okay, it's like - I want to do something about the, um - " she gave a small giggle - "psychosexual symbolism of Xena's weapons?"

Lynn was long past being shocked by anything that came out of a student's mouth, but this was - new. "The _what_?"

"Oh - I mean, how the sword is, like" - Carrie made quote marks in the air - "phallic... And the chakram is, um..." She wrinkled her forehead. "You know, like a ... female anatomy symbol?"

"A female anatomy symbol," Lynn repeated slowly. Her eyes drifted to the window, but out there was only a grey and bloated sky, more November than April. Three more weeks, she thought; the spring term would be over and she'd have all summer to focus on the book. "I don't think there's any part of the female anatomy that looks like that."

"Hey - I didn't come up with that myself." Carrie examined the writing inked in blue on her pale thin arm. "It came up, like, in my psych class - 'Feminism and Freud'? I mean - "

"Carrie, this is history, not psychology."

"Oh." Deflated, Carrie twirled a strand of ash-blond hair around her finger. "Okay - I, um - I guess I'll just think of another topic."

"The paper's due in three weeks," Lynn said patiently. "Want me to suggest some topics?"

"No, thanks - I want to be, like - creative? Anyway, I'll see you in class Monday. Oh and - what's the reading? I forgot."

"Tacitus' _Annals_ chapter fourteen, and Suetonius' 'Life of Augustus.' We'll be discussing how they differ in their account of Xena's return to Rome and Livia's conversion."

"Oh okay." Carrie stared helplessly at the poster on the wall; then she turned back to Lynn, suddenly animated. "Hey - can I write a paper that has, like, something to do with the musical?"

Lynn sighed. "No, you can't."

"Okay... I'll think of something else then." Carrie rose dejectedly from the chair. "See you in class."

It was starting to drizzle outside, the first droplets streaking the windowpane.

 _Three more weeks._

x x x

The faculty cafeteria was too crowded, and Lynn took a steak sandwich and a Coke back to her office where she could eat in peace and catch up on the latest _Journal of Ancient History_ ; there was a short but interesting article on the cult of Ares in Thrace. Halfway through the article and the sandwich, someone knocked on the door and pushed it open.

"Lynn?"

She turned and found herself staring at Peter Erickson from the political science department - tall, fair-haired and rather handsome in a boyish way, wearing a casual brown corduroy jacket. He had a slightly crooked, nervous grin on his pleasant face.

"Hi, Peter," she said in a carefully neutral tone.

As always, the sight of him made her feel irritated, less at him than at herself, and vaguely guilty. Their short-lived relationship had started about a year before, after she had broken her ankle while running. She and Peter had barely known each other until then, except for a few brief conversations at faculty gatherings; and then, there he was, helping her up a flight of stairs, carrying a box of papers for her, volunteering to move some books from the office to her apartment and even to do the shopping. It was definitely a change of pace. She ribbed him about his gallantry, feeling a bit uneasy and the tiniest bit flattered; he responded with self-effacing good humor. To her surprise, it turned out they had something in common: Peter was an ancient history buff. She enjoyed talking to him about the Greeks and the Romans, and sharing stories of trips to ancient sites; he was the only other person she knew who had read an obscure, badly translated Polish historical novel about the Amazons, _Daughters of Artemis_. He had been kind and gentle and considerate, and Lynn had found herself wondering what it would be like to settle down with a man like that. She thought of it now as her walk on the tame side.

"How's it going?" she asked.

"Good, good... Hey, I was going to invite you to lunch but I see you're already - " He gestured in the direction of her food. "This is very unhealthy, you know."

Lynn's mouth tightened. This brought back memories; bad ones. Like having lunch with Peter at the college cafeteria and being gently nagged to load up her plate at the salad bar. She should have been on to him right away when he brought her skim milk from the supermarket. When he told her she wasted too much time watching kung fu movies, that did it. It would have been mildly embarrassing to tell people what had precipitated their breakup, except that she didn't talk to people about such things.

"Come on in," she said reluctantly.

"Thanks." Peter slouched against a bookshelf, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets. "So, how's it going with the book?"

"Good ... thanks."

"Yeah? You know, I could get you in touch with my agent - "

"I have an agent. I also have a publisher. Knopf."

"Good." Peter shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and repeated, "Good," and she knew what was coming next. "So, uh - are you doing anything tonight? Or tomorrow night?"

She looked away. "Peter..."

"Come on, Lynn. Have you even had a single date since we broke up?"

He wore an expression of such genuine concern that she wanted to throw him out and slam the door in his face. Instead, she said, "I don't owe you an account of my love life."

"What love life? With Xena?" Peter waved at the poster. "I mean, that's pretty much your whole life. All you ever do is - " He shook his head.

"You _know_ we weren't right for each other."

"Well - is anyone right for you, Lynn?" Peter rubbed his chin and sighed. "At some point you have to face the fact that this has to do with your commitment issues. It all goes back to your mother leaving and - "

"Peter." There was nothing like attempted psychoanalysis to turn her voice to ice; sharp ice. "Don't go there again."

The phone picked a good time to ring. She grabbed it abruptly, like a weapon.

"Lynn?"

"Oh hi, Jackie." Belatedly, she hoped Jackie wouldn't be taken aback by the sheer enthusiasm in her voice. She wasn't.

"Listen, I was thinking - if you're not doing anything tonight, I could come over with that DVD, you know, _Love and War_ with Terfel and Vaness - maybe get some takeout - "

"Sure. Six o'clock?"

"Wow, really?" Jackie laughed, obviously delighted by her unexpected success. She had never been to Lynn's place before. "That's great. I'll be there at six ... well, six-ish."

"It's the corner of fourteenth and - "

"I know the building, the gray brick one with the blue overhang - I met you once in the lobby, remember? Apartment 8A, right?"

"Right. See you then."

Lynn hung up and turned to Peter.

"There," she said. "I do have a date."

x x x

On the screen, a bearded man with a face a bit too pudgy for the God of War stood facing a tall woman in some costume designer's idea of Xena's armor; the real Xena, Lynn was convinced, would never have had golden roses on her breastplate. The cluttered stage set around them represented the gods' palace on Mount Olympus, with a bit of wear and tear to suggest the Twilight of the Gods. Xena and Ares - who, in this opera, was stuck with the ridiculous name Marte, the Italian version of Mars - were singing their final duet, "Quel sacrifizio d'amore" ("This sacrifice for love"); an ominous burst of sound from the orchestra was Ares' cue to collapse into Xena's arms and start his very long death scene. As the sappy romantic he was, Verdi had used an obscure version of the Xena legend in which Ares gave up not just his godhood but his life to revive Eve and Gabrielle. While Xena vocalized her grief and gratitude, the dying Ares continued to sing with remarkable vigor; Gabrielle and Eve joined in, also singing surprisingly well for people just back from the brink of death. The only one not singing was Athena, who was dead and doing a good job of it except for a visible twitch in her right arm.

Lynn tossed her head slightly and shifted her eyes to the window. It was now completely dark, and as the music ebbed for a moment she could hear the drip of rain and the distant sounds of traffic drifting up from Sixth Avenue. She glanced at Jackie, who sat next to her on the black leather couch in her living room, and almost asked if she wanted any more mineral water; then she noticed that the girl actually had tears in her eyes, silly thing. It was best to wait until the end. About five minutes and one awkward kiss later, Ares expired in Xena's arms, which Xena found to be the right time to tell him at last, on a piercingly high note, that she loved him. The final chords surged tragically and the heavy folds of the curtain came down, and Jackie said in a hushed tone, "Wasn't that beautiful?"

"It was ... interesting," Lynn said cautiously. The tightness she felt in her chest at the opera's final moments, when the stage gradually turned completely dark except for one spot where Xena stood alone, had taken her by surprise.

She reached over and turned on the lamp, one of a matching pair that Jackie had oohed and aahed over earlier. They were genuine antiques, with bronze statuettes of Xena, Gabrielle and Argo, that stood out among Lynn's otherwise boring functional décor. She would have never bought anything like this herself, of course; the lamps were a gift from her colleagues for her thirtieth birthday, three years ago.

The curtain rose again on the screen, and the actors came out to take their bows, Xena and Athena peaceably holding hands and smiling as the clapping became a thick wave of applause. Lynn picked up the remote and stopped the playback, and Jackie flinched at the loud voice of a newswoman talking about gang violence in Los Angeles. Lynn quickly silenced the television. As the screen faded to coal grey, Jackie gave her a disappointed look.

"You didn't like it."

"It's not that... You want to finish this?" Lynn motioned to the cartons of Chinese food on the coffee table.

"No thanks; I'll just have some more Seltzer."

"The thing is" - Lynn scooped some barely warm lumps of orange beef on her plate - "this is just the kind of romantic mythology that makes my job so difficult. Do you know how many of my students are convinced that Xena and Gabrielle really slept in an ice cave for twenty-five years? I wouldn't be surprised if some them think, deep down, that Ares actually put them there."

"You don't think it's possible?"

Lynn stopped chewing and gave her a scandalized look.

"I mean - I mean that they slept - were frozen in an ice cave," Jackie explained hastily. "They - well, they did disappear for twenty-five years and they didn't age..."

"Or so people said. It's not like we have pictures. Obviously, they went into hiding with all those temple armies on their trail, all worked up about some stupid little prophecy. Then they resurfaced some time later, well-rested and in pretty good shape."

"But - not a day older?"

"For all we know, they could have been missing for five years, maybe ten - the twenty-five years was just poetic license. You can't take everything so literally."

"But Livia was twenty-six when - "

"We don't even know for sure that Livia was Xena's daughter. See, that's the problem - we're dealing with so much conflicting information, mostly from second-hand sources... " Lynn put down the plate and took a sip of Coke. "Or maybe - who knows, among her many skills Xena could have invented a miracle anti-aging cream."

Jackie smiled wistfully. "Yeah, you're probably right..."

"Look, I deal with this all the time. A student came to me today asking if she could write her term paper on _Xena_ , the musical."

"What did you say?"

"Well, I could have asked her what she was smoking. Problem is, she might have actually told me."

"You said no?"

"Of course I said no. What was I supposed to say?"

"Well..." Jackie looked up at her with a guilty little grin, smoothing the skirt of her long dress. "Maybe you could have told her to write a paper comparing the musical with the actual history... You know - that way she could write about something that she can relate to personally, and still have it be a serious paper and everything - "

Lynn gave her a thoughtful look, twisting the glass in her hand. Then she shrugged slightly and looked away.

"Maybe you're on to something."

"Really?" Jackie beamed with pride. "See, I've always thought that all these things can really enrich scholarship - fantasy, the creative spirit..." - she looked up dreamily - "the imagination..."

Lynn put down the glass and got up. "Now you're scaring me."

"Sorry... Here, let me help you with that," Jackie added as Lynn picked up the empty plates. "Hey, if it's your book you're worried about - don't worry. It's your book, I'm just the - ha-ha - the humble ghostwriter."

They were in the cramped stuffy kitchen, putting the dishes down on the counter, when the phone burst into a shrill ring. Something about the way it rang made Lynn shiver with anticipation, or maybe it only seemed that way later. She looked around, trying to remember where she'd put down the phone; it rang again, angry and insistent. Finally, there it was on the dressing table in the small hallway across from the kitchen, half-hidden by Jackie's umbrella. She snatched it in mid-ring.

"Hello?"

The brief silence at the other end filled with a low buzz. Then a sonorous velvet baritone said, "Lynn?" She knew the voice instantly, and felt a quick stab of excitement. "It is Mario Angelotti - "

Her grip on the phone tightened. Mario was on an archeological dig in Macedonia. It had to be - what, four o'clock in the morning for him?

"What's up?" She tried to sound casual.

"We found something."

"What?"

"A temple of Arreez." Mario's voice rolled over the sounds. "Over the ground, you understand, it is just a few stones - it's, how do you say - no wonder nobody found this before - but the chambers undergrrround - bellissimo! Mm - beautiful!" The phone hissed and gurgled faintly as he paused. "It has something to do with your girl."

"Well? What did you find?" She turned and saw Jackie - she'd almost forgotten about Jackie! - staring at her with avid curiosity.

"We _maybe_ found - some of Gabriela's original scrolls."

Lynn held back a gasp. "No!"

She heard Mario's rich chuckle. "Maybe no. Maybe yes. You want to come look, eh?"

"Yes. Yes, of course." She tried to ignore the pounding in her temples. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

"I send a car to meet you at the Thessaloniki airport - there is a bus, but not reliable. Just let me know when you arrive, okay? Here - write down the number..." Lynn strode over to the desk to grab a pen and a notepad; in her excitement, she knocked over the pen holder and the damned things clattered all over the desk.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Thank you, Mario - I really appreciate it. I'll be there - first flight - and Mario? Don't move anything, okay?"

"No problem. Oh - Lynn?"

"Yeah?"

"We found something else. Round metallic thing - "

After a speechless, breathless moment, she could muster only a feeble, "You're kidding."

"No, no - we found it. It could be just a decoration, you understand. It is, uh - fixed to the wall - we haven't taken it down yet. Have to be very careful. But it looks exactly like the chakram of Xena."

After she hung up, Lynn swept aside the spilled pens and pencils, sat down and turned on the screen of her computer. As she waited to get online, inwardly cursing the slow connection, she thought she should call her father and tell him. Then it hit her that she'd forgotten about Jackie again. She turned around abruptly, just as Jackie asked, "What are you doing?"

"Booking a flight to Greece."

"To _Greece_?" Jackie stepped closer into the lamplight, her eyes sparkling, as excited as she had been when she first walked into Lynn's office. "They found something that has to do with Xena, right? Something important?"

"Maybe." Lynn paused and added, "It could always be a fake." Damn Jackie's contagious enthusiasm; she was having a hard enough time keeping her own agitation in check, to steel herself against possible disappointment - the way it had turned out before.

"Well, what is it?"

She sighed. "It may be a stash of Gabrielle's original scrolls."

Jackie raised her hands to her mouth and uttered a muffled "Oh my God."

Lynn turned back to the screen and clicked on the link to a travel website. As she typed in her query - New York to Thessaloniki - Jackie came up and stood over her shoulder. "So you're going over there? When?"

"Tomorrow if I can get a flight."

"Oh my God, Lynn." She was silent for a moment. Then she blurted out, "Can I come too?"

"Don't be ridiculous." The search results came up; a United Airlines flight with a Milan connection, leaving at half past six. Seats available.

"You've got to take me with you. We're writing this book together, right? I mean, okay - I'm just your ghostwriter - but you know how important it is - "

"What are you going to do on an archeological dig?"

"Whatever you're going to do. You're not an archeologist either."

"No, but - "

"You can use an assistant, can't you? _Please._ " She leaned down on the desk, peering into Lynn's face. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me. Look, I _know_ I can write a much better book if I can see all this with my own eyes - if I can get a _feel_ for it - don't you understand?"

"Jackie - on such short notice, it's two thousand dollars for a round trip."

"I've got money - I just got paid for the diet book."

"What diet book?"

"Oh you know - this diet book I co-wrote - it doesn't matter really, it's not like _you'll_ ever need it." Jackie faltered and added, unsure that Lynn had gotten the joke, "You know, because you're in such good…" She trailed off and swept back her hair with the nervous little laugh she always had when she was worried that her attempt at humor had been offensive. "Lynn, I can pay for the ticket, don't worry about it, okay?"

She still offered a feeble, mostly token resistance. "I - I don't even know if they have tickets on that flight."

"Well, would you check?"

Lynn sighed and turned to the computer. What the hell, at least she'd have company on her trip. As if she'd need company when she had _this_ kind of discovery waiting for her. Her body was taut with excitement. _Searching ... please wait_ , the computer told her. Over her shoulder, she could feel Jackie holding her breath. Then the blue letters winked out and the search results scrolled over the screen.

She looked up at Jackie. "All right. But I get the aisle seat."

x x x

 _Greece._

It hit her when she walked up Broadway from the subway stop, sidestepping the shimmery puddles on the sidewalk, only half-aware of the cars sloshing by and the din of the crowd; after ten, the Upper West Side and its restaurants and bars were still bustling with life.

Tomorrow, she was going to Greece. Jackie stopped and shook her head, and found herself smiling at a total stranger, an elegant platinum blonde who gave her an odd look.

What would it be like, she wondered as she walked on. Cypress groves, and sheep grazing in fields, and somewhere amidst sloping green hills, the still-forbidding ruins of Ares' temple - and there, in some dark and mysterious ancient chamber, Gabrielle's scrolls. Jackie shivered in the bracing chill that had set into the evening air after the rain had ended.

Turning the corner, she walked into the denser gray of the night away from Broadway's brightness. It occurred to her that she hadn't even asked Lynn what clothes to pack. _Gabrielle's scrolls..._ she tried to imagine holding them in her hands - brittle yellow papyrus, or maybe smooth, rich leather ... would they have the unique, magical smell of old books? Would she feel, when she touched them, that in some way she had made contact with Gabrielle herself? Would they turn out to be the real thing?

Jackie reached into her purse for her keys. For the first time, she consciously realized that a part of the thrill she felt was at the thought of taking a trip with Lynn. It was weird, the way she'd only known Lynn for about a month but it felt as if they'd been friends forever. Of course, most of her friends were back in Massachusetts; after a year in New York, the only person she really knew here was Artie, and Artie was -

Artie was right in front of her, waving to her with an excited "Hey!" as he tried to restrain a yelping Jasper, who was straining at the leash and looking up at her with his goofy golden retriever grin.

"Hi, Jasper!" Jackie leaned down to scratch behind the dog's warm ear. "Hi, Artie."

Artie was her next-door neighbor who had taken her under his wing almost from the day she'd moved in. Sometimes she suspected that he was working up the courage to ask her out. Artie was a software engineer and looked the part.

"Hi, Jackie." He cleared his throat and gave her a sweet Jasper-like grin. "What are you, like, back from a date?"

"Not exactly. I had dinner with Lynn - you know, Lynn Doyle, the one I'm co-writing the book with - " She patted Jasper's muzzle as he nudged wetly at her palm.

"Oh yeah, yeah." Artie nodded cheerfully. "The book. About your friend the, umm, barbarian queen."

She chuckled, stepping back to dodge Jasper's attempt to paw at her. "Warrior Princess."

"Yeah, well - whatever... Jasper, you stop that!" Artie tugged half-heartedly at the leash. "Ahem - say, Mom was coming to town and I was going to take her to the Philharmonic on Monday, but what do you know, she had to cancel. I got the spare ticket, so I thought maybe you wanted to - to - "

"Oh - thanks, Artie, but - " He stared expectantly, and she fidgeted with excitement and a kind of embarrassment. "Guess what - I'm going to be in Greece."

"Say what?"

"I'm going to Greece. Tomorrow."

Jasper woofed softly in response. Artie took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, squinting at Jackie. "Huh. You didn't tell me you were going away - what, like - on vacation?"

"No, no. I'm going with Lynn - I only just found out tonight - Artie, you're not going to believe this, I was over at Lynn's place tonight and then all of a sudden we're going to Greece." She paused for breath, then exhaled with a nervous laugh - "I'm not making much sense, am I?" Before Artie had a chance to answer that, she continued, "See, they found something really important … something that has to do with Xena. Some sort of archeological find. Can you imagine? I've always wanted to go on an archeological dig!"

"Really?" Artie put his glasses back on and furrowed his brow, ignoring Jasper's fretting. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah, sure - why?"

"You know - nice middle-class girl from Massachusetts, out in the middle of nowhere - you could get some kind of rare virus, or - Jasper, _down_! -or food poisoning - the toilet facilities are totally unsanitary - "

"Artie, I'm a big girl."

"Well - they could have some pretty big viruses, you know?"

"Uh-huh." Never knowing quite how to react to Artie's humor, she smiled and patted his arm. "Look, I really appreciate that you're looking out for me… but honestly, I'll be okay."

"Well, what do _I_ know. I've never even been to a foreign country. Unless of course" - Artie gave a self-conscious little laugh, telegraphing the joke - "you count New York. You know? My folks in Ohio - they think New York _is_ a foreign country."

"Um, right." Jackie smiled uncertainly and fumbled again for her keys. "Well, look - I really should be going in, I have to pack and everything…"

"How long are you going for?"

"Just ten days. Lynn has to be back for the end of the semester."

"Oh okay. Well, have a good trip … I guess I'll, uh - I'll see you when you get back."

"Of course." Jackie squatted to say good-bye to Jasper, wincing a little and giggling when he licked her face; then she rose, reached up and awkwardly pressed her lips to Artie's cheek. "Take care, okay?"

"Um - s-sure." He bent down to adjust Jasper's collar. "You take care."

Jackie was already going up the front steps, keys in hand, when she heard Artie's voice behind her. "Hey - how are you getting to the airport?"

She turned. Artie stood before her in a spot of yellowish street light, looking even taller and lankier than usual, with Jasper straining at the leash and whimpering, his tail wagging wildly.

"Cab, I guess."

"Well" - Artie squirmed a little and adjusted his glasses - "I, uh - I could give you a ride."

x x x

"Do you ever worry about plane crashes and stuff?"

Lynn leaned back, sipping her beer as she caught the first dubious whiff of airline food. "No," she said.

It was a minor miracle, or maybe not so minor, that they were on the plane at all. Lynn had planned to call a cab, of course; and then Jackie called to say that some friend of hers, Archie … no, Artie … had volunteered to give them a ride. Artie turned out to be a sweet guy, in a nerdy kind of way; he wore a plaid shirt and looked like he should have been wearing huge thick-rimmed glasses. He arrived in a beige Chevrolet that wasn't quite as old as it looked, with Jackie in the front passenger seat - excited and very summery in her light green dress with small blue flowers - and a shaggy, grinning golden retriever in the back. "What's that?" Lynn asked warily as Artie clambered out of the car to help with the luggage, and he chuckled awkwardly and explained that Jasper had to come with them because, well, he couldn't just sit at home alone. While they were hauling Lynn's suitcase into the trunk, the lid of the trunk safely between them and Jackie, Artie paused to stare at Lynn and said, in a suddenly challenging though slightly sheepish tone, "You're going to make sure she's okay, right?" "Yes, of course," she said, a bit taken aback and a bit amused. He nodded earnestly and said, "Let's go."

On the way to the airport, Jackie chattered happily and Artie occasionally cast longing glances at her at he drove, and the dog made puppy eyes at Lynn and tried to cuddle up to her; and after a while they got stuck in a horrific traffic jam on the Belt Parkway. With the cars barely crawling, Artie insisted on going off the highway and taking the roundabout way, and they found themselves circling around some neighborhood where an air of dreariness clung to the stocky brick buildings and the people outside. It was taking forever, and Jackie kept saying "Oh no - we'll never make it" and craning her neck as if she could see a way out, and Lynn sat still but inwardly wanted to bite her nails, tear out her hair, and kill Artie and his little dog too. Jasper, at least, stayed blithely oblivious to all their human troubles - an occasional pat on the head from Lynn was enough to keep him happy.

At last Jackie remembered that she had her cell phone with her and frantically called the airline, and wonder of wonders - "Saved by flight delays!" Jackie exclaimed, laughing incredulously, and Lynn was finally able to relax and laugh with her. The flight was two hours late; their layover in Milan was long enough for them not to worry about making the flight to Thessalonica. The rest of the drive was fairly uneventful. Once at the airport, they found the terminal easily; Artie helped unload the luggage, got a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek from Jackie, and stammered a good-bye, and Jasper wagged his tail at his new best friend Lynn.

And now, here they were.

Jackie closed her book, a paperback of the popular but, in Lynn's opinion, much too romantic _Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archeology,_ and turned away to stare into the solid darkness of the window. "You know" - there was a bemused note in her voice - "sometimes I'm on a plane and I look at how normal everything is… the drinks, the dinner, and people reading books and magazines and watching movies and everything - and it's just hard to believe that anything bad could happen. And then I think - you know, every time a plane crashed it was just like this too, people doing all these normal things and then - "

"Do you always spread cheer like this when you fly?"

"Oh God, am I being morbid? Sorry." Jackie turned to her with a sheepish smile, fingering a corner of the book's cover. "Sometimes I just - think about things like that."

"Plane crashes?"

"No, no - you know, like …matters of life and death."

"I try not to." Then, for some reason, she added, "When I was twelve I almost died." Her own words startled her; it was something she hardly ever talked about.

"Oh my God," Jackie whispered. "What happened?"

"I went to the beach with my cousin and her boyfriend. We swam out too far and - I almost drowned."

"God." Jackie shook her head, her eyes wide. "How awful."

"Well, not _that_ awful. I'm still here."

But it _was_ that awful. For years, she had even kept it from her father, mainly because she didn't want to get Sally in trouble. Sally was seventeen then, a swimmer on her high school team; and she had been too proud to tell Sally and Jeff that she was tired and wanted to turn back. And then there was the horror of salt water burning her mouth and nose and throat, choking her - the panicked flailing, the water closing over her head, daylight and air all gone - and the humiliation of being carried out of the water by Jeff, half-aware, and flopped down on a blanket like a wet rag doll while the people around her shouted and fussed. There was another memory too, but that one had to be a hallucination: a memory of being submerged in bone-chillingly cold water that filled her mouth and nostrils, her fists pounding helplessly at a sheet of ice.

Suppressing a shiver, Lynn poured the rest of her beer into the foam-flecked plastic cup and turned to Jackie, who was saying something about - Gabrielle's scrolls.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Are you going to know right away if they're really Gabrielle's scrolls?"

"Well, not exactly. I've seen samples of Gabrielle's writing, so I'll have a pretty good idea. But they'll have to do tests - the age of the parchment, that kind of thing."

"I just know - " Jackie started to say with a dreamy smile, but Lynn cut her off.

"You just know that this is the real deal? _Please_ don't say that."

"What, are you afraid I'll jinx it?"

"No, it's just…" She shook her head and looked away. "Jackie, I want so badly to believe that it's the real deal. I've been through something like this before and - "

"You're afraid you'll have your heart broken," Jackie said quietly, and Lynn suddenly felt embarrassed - she had said too much, shown too much. She shifted in her seat, tension prickling at her skin. The awkward little silence between them filled with the mundane noises of dinner service.

"Well," Lynn said. "That's a little too strong."

x x x

Jackie threw her head back and let the warm fragrant wind rush over her face and her hair. The Greek countryside, the dazzling sky spotted with a few small fluffy clouds - the olive trees by the highway, just like two thousand years ago when Xena and Gabrielle themselves might have traveled on these roads… life couldn't be better. No, it would be better once they got to the site. She couldn't hear what Lynn and Mario were talking about in the front of the jeep but it was something about the dig, of course. Closing her eyes, Jackie tried to imagine what the temple would be like: the murky air heavy with the weight of the ages, the crumbled columns perhaps more majestic in ruins than when they stood tall and proud; friezes of battle scenes - it was a Temple of War, after all - with the warriors' faces blurred by time.

She opened her eyes, smiling at the sun-drenched day and at the indifferent sheep milling by the roadside. What would it be like, wandering around that temple? Would she feel like she was in a place marked by the touch of the gods? The gods … well, they were real enough to the people back then. Gabrielle's scrolls were full of stories about meeting the gods face to face, about Ares and Xena, about her own friendship with Aphrodite … was it a bit like the imaginary friends one had in childhood? Lynn wanted to explore a new theory in her book - that maybe it wasn't all fantasy, maybe Xena and Gabrielle knew some priests who believed themselves to be earthly vessels of the gods here on earth, and were convincing enough to pull off such an act. Lynn always had a rational explanation for everything. Or tried to have one.

Even without gods, this was going to be a great adventure. It was such an honor that Lynn had asked her to come along … all right, it was more like she had invited herself … but even so, they were going to work as a team, and she knew she was not going to disappoint Lynn. They wouldn't just be a team, they were going to be friends … maybe not yet, but some day. And so far, the trip had been wonderful - _well, except for the almost-missing-the-flight part … Artie could be such a klutz sometimes_ \- but everything else was already more exciting than she had expected. The quick stopover in Milan where they had sandwiches and cappuccino - the Thessalonica airport, which bustled with shouting, hurrying, gesticulating people - being met by the ebullient Mario, a stocky, suntanned middle-aged man with a peppery beard and an operatic voice... Jackie squinted and swept her hair away from her eyes.

As she stared at the back of Mario's sun-reddened leathery neck, she heard him say, "Like I told you, the disc is fixed or, how do you say, mounted in the wall…"

 _It was real._ Jackie was gripped by a quick, violent surge of excitement, as if she had only just now realized that this adventure was real, that they really were in Greece, really on their way to an ancient temple of Ares. Maybe her whole life had been a prelude to this: a quiet, fantasy-rich childhood in a well-tended, well-mannered New England town; an adolescence of reading books and dating the nice boy next door (two doors away, to be exact); four uneventful years in the liberal arts program at Wellesley and her sudden whim to sign up for ancient Greek; the start of a successful if low-key writing career; the much-anticipated move to New York. All of it, a road leading here. _Wait a minute, that sounded crazy - talk about getting carried away._ She had never really stopped believing that something very special was going to happen to her some day - but then again, maybe everyone believed that, deep down...

Over the whooshing of the wind, she heard Lynn say, "The whole scroll?" and Mario reply something that she couldn't make out, except for "twilight" and "Ares" and "the usual version." Smiling to herself, she held out a hand to feel the wind splash against her palm and flow through her fingers. In the distance, a fairy-tale village huddled at the foot of an emerald hill, and a row of cypresses stood tall and graceful on the hilltop, their slender shapes etched in black into the bright blue sky. If something special ever did happen to her, it would be here.

x x x

"Oh, my God."

 _I knew she was going to say that -_ the thought echoed dimly in Lynn's mind and faded before it was fully formed; she herself was almost as stunned as Jackie.

Outside, the temple hadn't looked like much - just some nondescript piles of grey rocks, once overgrown with lush grass and shrubbery; no wonder archeological digs had bypassed it until now. There was nothing left of the ground-level floor of the temple, except for a few mosaic tiles, too worn-out and too fragmented to make out what they were. But Mario's team had found a passage leading to a vast underground chamber, and that was where they stood now.

The four large lamps installed by the workers weren't enough to light the whole chamber, and parts of the walls and the floor were sunk into deep shadows; but what they could see in the harsh yellow-tinted light was nothing short of stunning, and Lynn liked to think that she wasn't easily stunned. The wall paintings alone - the bright colors, the clear lines … they looked like they could have been finished last month. They depicted battles, not surprisingly since this was a temple of the God of War; one of them in particular, the central panel on the back wall, caught Lynn's eye. She came closer to get a good look. There was Xena - black leather armor, jet black hair and blue eyes, chakram in hand - battling Romans under the grey walls of a city. There was another, smaller woman with short blond hair, in a red top and a short skirt, riding through the battlefield on a white horse clutching a sword.

"Gabrielle," Jackie whispered behind her.

"Yes, we think that is Gabriella." Mario's voice reverberated under the low ceiling. " _Very_ rare - _wonderful_ \- not many portraits of Gabriella at all."

"Funny," Jackie said, "she's not wearing any armor. Well - she's known as poet, not a warrior -"

"She has a sword." Lynn cocked her head, thinking. "I think that's supposed to be the battle at Salonae - remember, when Xena wanted Gabrielle to stay behind as her scribe - "

"Oh God, yes - and then the Romans laid a trap for them and Gabrielle defied Xena's orders and went out on the battlefield to save her…"

Lynn turned around, scanning the room. The decorations here were sparse: four columns of black stone with weaponry and skulls carved into their sides, two wall niches with bronze statuettes of Amazons, a few swords and shields and battle-axes on the walls … and there, brightly lit and mounted into a large slab of bare, flat rock, was a gleaming metallic circle with a curved handle in the middle.

"The chakram…" It was strange to hear herself speak in this underground chamber of a ruined temple. She walked up to the wall and stopped, the dull echo of Jackie's steps trailing behind her. "So you haven't tried to remove it yet?"

"We have to do, um" - Mario paused, searching for words - "to be very careful. It would be terrible to do damage…"

Lynn reached out toward the chakram but didn't touch it, not yet. She ran her hand over the stone. "Is that a door?"

"Looks like the door, yes?" Mario touched the hair-thin crack in the wall. "Maybe one other secret chamber. We not know how to open yet."

"What do you think is in there?" Jackie asked.

"Hmm - perhaps the gold, silver - _tesori_ \- the treasures of the temple…"

"Or maybe scrolls," Jackie said.

"The scrolls - oh, the scrolls we have found in this chamber." Mario motioned to a large, dark chest standing by a wall. "There."

Jackie took a few steps toward the chest, then stopped and looked sheepishly from Mario to Lynn.

"Oh, they are not there now," Mario chuckled, his dark eyes twinkling merrily. "All ready for you - in the cabin."

"Can we see them?" Lynn hoped that her voice would hold steady even though her heart was beating too fast.

"Yes, yes - I show you now." Mario waved his hand, indicating the outside of the temple. "Come."

"Great," Lynn said. "Mario …" She wasn't quite sure what to say, and finally managed an awkward " _grazie._ "

" _De niente_." He grinned and patted her on the shoulder. "I could not - what is the expression, huh? - I would not want you to miss this - for the world."

x x x

 _I'm still thinking about what happened at the inn last night. As Xena and I sat down to dinner, someone told the innkeeper who we were. Suddenly, she was at our table, screaming at us and telling us to get out…_

"Hmm - this one looks like a diary," Lynn muttered. "Or just some notes…"

"Amazing," Jackie said. "Amazing…"

She wasn't sure how long they had been here in the cabin just off the dig, poring over the scrolls which they handled with protective cotton gloves. Glancing at the small window, she saw that it was getting dark outside. The parchments were laid out on a large wooden table, under the steady yellowish light of an overhead lamp; there were stools, but Jackie and Lynn had to stand to read the scrolls placed further away from the table's edges. Some of these were familiar, with intact copies surviving to this day ( _was this really written in Gabrielle's hand?_ ); others, such as the one about the death of Eli and about the final Twilight of the Gods, had been lost except for passages quoted by contemporary historians. To see them like this in their entirety, actually reading the text surrounding those recognizable fragments, should have been thrilling; but the thrill was oddly dulled. Dimly, Jackie knew that the full force of it wouldn't hit her until some time later.

She imagined Gabrielle hunched over a wooden table in a room at the inn, in the light of a sputtering oil lamp, writing this.

 _She shouted that she didn't want our money and she didn't want us in her inn. She looked straight at Xena and screamed "murderer," and I wondered in shock how this woman could be connected to something from Xena's past. But she wasn't. Turns out her husband had served in the Roman legion in North Africa, where Xena and I helped the nomad tribes defeat the Romans. He was killed there. She kept shouting and Xena got up from the table, her face frozen, and walked to the door. It must hurt her terribly, to know that not all the pain she has caused innocent people was in the past – the past she left behind long ago. I wish she'd talk to me about it, but I know she won't. We have another battle to prepare for; we're going up against a raider named Orcan, whose army has attacked several villages in the Parthian province – villages no one will protect because they lie on land disputed by two cities. Another day, another fight._

 _And there was something else that happened today. We were riding past a small village at the bottom of a hill. I noticed that Xena had a strange, absent look on her face, and I worked up the courage to ask what was wrong. She finally told me. That was the village where, many, many years ago, she saved a child from death at the hand of her own soldiers, survived a gauntlet, and then joined Hercules to defeat her former army and began a life of fighting for good. I told her it should be a good thing, being back here; it's where she was born to a new life. She shrugged and muttered, "I guess," but I could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere. I didn't pry anymore. I should find a way to work all this into my next scroll after we've put a stop to Orcan. I've never written about that part of Xena's past – how she turned her life around and became the person I know. This is a good chance to do that._

"Well, that's it," Lynn said. "It just breaks off here."

Something about Jackie's silence made her look up. Jackie was staring ahead, a distant, almost dazed look on her face.

"What?" After another moment, Lynn reached out and poked Jackie in the arm. "What is it?"

With a start, Jackie looked at her and blinked, her mouth half-open.

"That's when she died," she said in a thick near-whisper.

"Who?"

Jackie coughed and stood up straight. "Xena."

For some reason Lynn shivered a little. "What do you mean?"

"I think she died in that battle. I don't know, it's like - "

"A premonition?"

"Well - I know, you're going to laugh but I just - " She shook her head and trailed off.

"Cue Twilight Zone music," Lynn said wryly. The irritating thing was that Jackie's silliness was catching; right now, she herself felt a bit spooked.

"Well, it _could_ be true - couldn't it? I mean, no one knows how she died. All we know is that it was some time after the siege of Ariminum - "

"For all we know, it could have been _at_ Ariminum."

"But this was written later." Jackie gestured quickly toward the scroll.

"Says who?"

Jackie's look turned sheepish. "Well, I - I guess I was getting a little ahead of myself."

Lynn sighed and glanced at her watch. "I think we've done enough reading for tonight."

"I'm sorry." Jackie looked down, then gave a small nervous laugh. "You're probably already sorry you took me along…"

"Nah, not yet." Lynn could hear the fake nonchalance in her own voice. The truth was, she still couldn't shake off that uneasy feeling. "Come on, let's see what they've got to eat around here. I'm starved."

x x x

She was alone in a clearing, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree a dying fire, hunched over, her head buried in her hands. She wasn't crying but her eyes ached with tears.

She lifted her head and stared at the moonless sky.

 _I love you, Xena._

The night was quiet, not even a gust of wind. Quiet as death.

Her best friend was dead. She had just left Xena's ashes in an urn of black stone in the family crypt in Amphipolis, the same crypt where, years ago, she had watched Xena talk to her dead brother. _It's hard to be alone. - You're not alone..._

And now, she was so alone…

Or maybe not.

She tensed, and then knew who it was. Half-turning her head, she saw him sit down beside her on the log; saw his face, flickers of firelight reflected in his dark eyes. The last time she had seen him was when he carried Xena's body to the pyre and put her down awkwardly - touching her cheek as if still hoping to wake her, lifting up her hand, and finally letting go, the look on his face bewildered and helpless. She wasn't sure how soon he had disappeared once the flames leaped up and billowed around the dry branches; she knew only that she glanced in his direction once, half-blind with tears and smoke and grief, and he was gone.

He was here now, next to her, looking at her. After a moment she turned away, then moved closer to him and sighed and rested her head on his shoulder. No one else had known her as they did, loved her as they did. He didn't move; they stayed like that, silent and still, until without warning the tears nearly choked her and she gasped and started sobbing. _How am I supposed to go on?_ The thought of it clawed at her soul, and the worst thing of all was the knowledge that there was nothing she or anyone else could do to stop this. She heard him mutter, "You'll be all right..." and his words momentarily yanked her out of her despair, turning the pain to a surge of anger.

"You should have been there!" she screamed hoarsely, whipping around to face him. "You should have been there, you bastard - you let it happen – you let it happen - "

She shouted it again and again, pummeling him with her fists, striking at his chest and his face; he made no attempt to parry her blows. Finally her fury was spent, and her tears too; she let her arms fall limply by her side and stared down, breathing hard.

"Feel better?" he grunted.

"No." She turned away from him and rose to her feet, staring at the shimmering embers of the fire and the last flutter of the tiny flames. Aimlessly, she wandered toward the edge of the clearing. Why would it make her feel better? It wasn't his fault that as they fought the raider Orcan and his army with the help of a local militia, one arrow Xena didn't catch hit her just above the breastplate. After that, everything happened so quickly and senselessly it still seemed like a bad dream: Two more arrows finding Xena as she reached for the one buried in her chest; Xena stumbling to her knees and managing to rise again, and being struck by one more arrow. By the time Gabrielle reached her, she was no longer moving and her eyes stared upward, unseeing, dead. Not his fault.

Maybe she'd gotten slower, or maybe that one arrow had been too fast. Maybe she'd been haunted by the thought that her new life's journey had begun in this valley and that perhaps things had come full circle; or by other things. Or maybe her luck had simply run out. _People in our line of work don't live to be old,_ Xena had said once.

"What do you want here, Ares? I don't need your help."

Then he was right in front of her. She could barely see his features in the dark, just the glittering of his eyes. Finally, he said, "I need yours."

She felt sick. "What?" she whispered. "You think I'm going to - "

"Stop it." He gripped her arm. "Come with me."

"Where?"

"A temple. You'll need this." Xena's chakram, which she had left attached to Argo's saddle, appeared in his hand. He stood still for a moment, staring at it; then he handed it to her. Before she could say another word, the air around them swirled and sparkled, and when the dizzying blur cleared they stood in a doorless, windowless chamber. One of the walls had a doorway in it, from floor to ceiling, but it led into another chamber, bare and dimly lit.

She looked around, baffled. In the low torchlight, she could see the paintings on the walls; one of them showed Xena and herself in the battle at Salonae. She bit her lips; she didn't want to start crying again.

"What do you - "

"Come here." He gestured toward the doorway, and she followed him warily. "I'm going in there." She tried to peer inside but he was blocking her way. Her stomach was in knots; it surprised her that she could still feel anxiety. "Once the doorway closes" - he pointed to two flat stone slabs on each side of the door, each with a gleaming metal semicircle in it - "you're going to take the chakram and put it in the circle."

She looked at him. Most of his face was hidden in the shadows, and she couldn't see his expression.

"And that's going to do what?"

"Seal the doorway."

"Seal the doorway…" She stared uncomprehendingly. "What - what are you going to do?"

He turned away to face the doorway. After a brief silence he said, "Sleep." His voice seemed to echo dully from the cavern inside.

The tears were choking her again. "Ares, I - " She touched his arm. "I can't …"

"I loved her," he said.

She made an effort to keep her voice steady. "I know you did." She stepped away and leaned against the wall, closing her eyes. The chakram slipped from her hand and rolled on the floor with a jangling sound, a doleful song that died slowly away. "We both loved her. People lose the ones they love, all the time - and we go on - "

"Dammit," he spat out. "Not for eternity!"

She wanted to say that maybe he'd forget some day. But he must have thought of it, too. Maybe that was worse.

When she opened her eyes, she saw his face in the reddish, quivering light of a torch. She couldn't tell if he looked scared or angry, or both. "What's the point?" he said. "Are you blaming yourself?" she asked softly. "It wasn't your fault - it was just another fight..."

She saw him shudder in disgust. "That's right, just another fight." His mouth was twisted in what was either a grimace of pain or a bitter sneer. "Fighting, bloodshed - death - it's what I do, remember?"

In the stillness, she could hear the faint crackling of a torch, and another sound that sounded like the tinkling of water.

Finally, she said, "And you want to be sealed here in this tomb - forever - "

"Until she comes back."

She turned to him with a start. "What?"

"Comes back. When the time is right - she can release me. She's the only one who can open the seal."

"You mean in a next life? But how will she - "

"That's the other thing you're going to do. Write it down."

"Ares - I don't know - "

He stepped closer, towering over her.

"Gabrielle." He paused and swallowed hard, forcing out the next word. "Please."

She wanted to tell him that without him, she'd be even more alone. She shook her head weakly. In the half-dark, she saw his jaw clench, and his hands gripped her shoulders.

"I'm the God of War. If things get bad, what do you think I'm going to do?" Something in his eyes made her want to shrink back; something that reminded her that, despite the grief they shared, he wasn't just a man - and that his grieving would not be like hers. "She won't be around - to stop me. And you won't get another chance." He added quietly, "She would have wanted this."

"She would have wanted _this_? To have you trapped in some cave - in some kind of - living death? Ares, she would have wanted you to go on - she knew you could be a better person - "

"Right. Keep dreaming."

Her eyes watered and a painful spasm clutched at her throat. When it let go, she took a deep breath. "I'll do it."

He let go of her and stepped back, his shoulders sagging. He looked very human now, human and old and tired.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered.

"I guess I owe you one."

"We were friends, weren't we?" She almost smiled, at a memory that hardly seemed real anymore. "Friends … Ares - remember that time on the farm, back when you were mortal - we were sitting by the fireplace, and she - "

"Don't."

She looked away, stifling another sob. At last she said, "I'll need something to write with..." Before she had even finished saying it, a piece of parchment and a quill appeared next to the chakram on the floor.

"The scroll - put it there." He pointed to a niche in the wall. "There's a space under the statue."

"All right," she said.

"Well - that's it, then." He lifted a hand to her face, as if wanting to touch her; then let it fall again.

"Good-bye, Ares," she said, almost inaudibly. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it lightly for a moment.

"Good-bye," he said.

She went to pick up the chakram. As she bent down to take it, her legs failed her and she sank down on the cool floor. She watched as he turned and walked through the doorway; she watched as the two sides of the wall began to slide toward each other, soundlessly, dreamlike, until the doorway had closed.

She got up and walked to the wall. She was nearly blinded by tears, and her hands were shaking, but somehow she still managed to press the chakram into the circle. A slight jolt stung her fingers and she jerked them away; tiny jets of blue fire danced and sparkled around the metal.

When the sparks had faded, she gingerly touched the chakram again. Nothing happened. She gave it a tug. It seemed to be welded solid into the wall.

"I'll miss you, Ares," she said. She didn't know if he could still hear her; it was better to think that he could not.

x x x

"I had the weirdest dream," Jackie said.

"Yeah?" Lynn took a bite of toast with honey and poured herself more coffee. The eating facilities at the site were pretty spartan - a table covered with scratched oilcloth and a couple of wobbly stools - but the food was surprisingly good ... or maybe it just that she had worked up quite an appetite. She hadn't felt so energetic, so - alive, since she was a teenager.

Jackie smiled wistfully, sweeping her ponytail off her shoulder. "Well, I've forgotten most of it ... but it had something to do with Gabrielle - and with Xena being dead - "

"Oh yeah? Did you see Xena's ghost?" Lynn winced at the hot, bitter coffee.

"Ha, ha. Don't worry, I'm not going to write any dreams into the book."

"Of course you won't. I won't let you."

Jackie made a face at her. She looked so much like a kid just then, in her brownish denim shorts and her blue shirt, her bare arms and legs slender and pale.

"So - what's the plan for today?"

"Today, we spend the whole day reading the scrolls and taking notes." Lynn rose, brushing toast crumbs off her black jeans and her T-shirt with a golden and red dragon, a souvenir from San Francisco's Chinatown. "I'm done - come on, finish up and let's go... What?"

Jackie was staring at her, her hand was frozen halfway to her mouth, a string of honey dripping slowly down from the slice of toast.

"What's wrong?"

"Scrolls," Jackie said in a strange, stifled voice. "There's another scroll."

Lynn's heart thumped and beat faster, and her own voice was a little choked up when she asked, "What? How do you know?"

"My dream." Jackie dropped the toast and got up, nearly kicking over her stool. "It was just - amazingly vivid - there was another scroll and I... she put it in this space under a statue..."

"Oh, Jackie - Jackie - come on... _" Whatever had possessed her to let Jackie come along?_ She should have been annoyed and little else - but she was still ridiculously agitated.

"Lynn." Jackie was pleading in earnest. "I know, this sounds insane - you're really going to think I'm nuts now, aren't you? But it was _so_ real - and it was something really important... can't we just go and look?"

Something inside Lynn was prodding her on with an urgent _yes yes yes_. She tried to ignore it but it was still there, still pushing her, still driving her crazy.

"All right," she said. "But we're not telling Mario that we're checking out something you saw in a dream."

They came out into the sunlight - it was a hot day, the sky a harsh blue - and walked, almost ran toward the temple site, fenced off by a hastily erected wire-mesh barrier. Much to Lynn's relief, Mario wasn't around. A few workers were clearing the dirt and moss off what looked like the remnants of a column. One of them, a dark-haired, sunburned young man in khaki pants and a grass-stained undershirt, waved and grinned and came over to them with an enthusiastic, "Ah - Miss Doyle!" He was a Greek who didn't speak much English, but they were able to communicate well enough in a mix of Italian, English, and Greek. In a few moments the young man was escorting them through the gate in the barrier, and down the ladder to the underground chamber of the temple where he turned on the battery-powered lights before leaving them alone.

The moment he was gone, Jackie made a dash for a niche in the wall across from the entrance.

"Wait, don't - " Lynn started to say, but before she could finish, "... touch anything," Jackie was already moving aside the small bronze statue of a woman warrior, reaching under it, and pulling out -

"Wait. Jackie - " Lynn couldn't move. "You can't do that - wait, we have to get Mario - you can't just - with no gloves or - _Jackie!_ "

As Jackie feverishly unfolded the scroll, Lynn half-expected it, for one dreadful moment, to crumble to dust in her hands.

"It's all right, it's fine," Jackie muttered in a shaky voice. "Come here - look! _I, Gabrielle of Potadeia, write this scroll on the tenth day of -_ "

After the initial surge of dizziness, Lynn was able to steady her breath and walk over to Jackie. They really had to get Mario - but for now -

 _I now write the words I hoped I would never write. Xena is dead. The Warrior Princess, my friend - Xena._

 _She, who had defeated gods and half-gods, was killed fighting a common warlord. It was just another battle – we had been through much worse - but this time the Fates had turned against her. I took her ashes to her family crypt in Amphipolis, just like she wanted_

 _I am writing this at the final request of Ares, the God of War, the man you loved. He didn't want to go on without you, Xena. He missed you too much and I think he blamed himself for losing you. He was afraid - of being alone, and of what he might become. Maybe he was afraid that someday he'd forget you._

 _He is asleep now, in the crypt behind the wall of this chamber. He told me that some day you can come back and free him. The chakram seals the door and I think you're the only one who can unseal it._

 _I don't know if you'll ever read this. Maybe it's madness to hope that you will. If you do - I love you, Xena._

The black letters on the yellowed parchment blurred and swam before Lynn's eyes; the rising din in her ears made it as if the chamber had suddenly filled with whispers. Then the whispers stilled and her vision cleared again. Her face was bathed in cold sweat.

Later, Lynn would never quite know what force - if it was a force other than her own will - made her walk to the wall, raise her hand, break every rule of professional conduct on an archeological site, and lay her hand on the chakram.

It felt like an electric shock; hair-thin strings of blue flame wove around the metal disc and then flared up into a small circle of fire that didn't burn, just stung her fingers. A bright flash blinded her momentarily, and then she was somewhere else, in another temple near an altar of stone, wearing an embroidered red blouse - the chakram clutched in her hand, her whole body charged with an exhilarating sense of physical power. She was smirking gleefully at a man who stood in front of her, a beautiful man in silver-studded black leather, with black hair and a goatee and dangerously soft brown eyes; and she felt a jolt of recognition and excitement as he smiled at her and said, "All right!" She turned around; behind her, there was a shorter young woman, a blonde in a brown-and-orange top and short skirt with a leather belt - Gabrielle! - and there were armored warriors rushing toward them.

She threw the chakram, and it spun in the air and knocked out some of the men and flew back toward her. She caught it easily and leaped, flipping in the air, her body strong and agile and capable of anything. The chakram came apart in her hands and she used its two sharp halves like curved blades, slicing at her enemies as she kicked and spun and yelled. "Welcome back!" Gabrielle shouted, fighting at her side, and she replied, "It's good to be back!" She took a strange joy in the fight, even when she saw the blood, even when she grabbed a sword from one of the dying warriors and drove it into another enemy behind her. Finally, she caught the chakram and leaped again, and found herself staring at the man in black ... _Ares_. Her chakram was at his throat but she was grinning at him, and the look he gave her was one of fondness and slight amusement.

"Lynn!" a distant voice called out, and the bright light flashed again. When it cleared and Lynn was able to see, she was back in the underground chamber on the dig; and the chakram was out of the wall and in her hand.

She glanced around her, feeling slightly disoriented, like someone just startled awake from a bizarre dream - only this vision, or hallucination, or whatever, had been starkly real.

"Lynn?" Jackie stood frozen to one spot gaping at her. "You okay?"

There was a sound behind her, a harsh scraping sound, like stone plates grinding against one another or furniture being moved. Lynn felt the tremor under her feet. She spun around and saw that the wall was opening up, the tiny crack in the stone widening slowly. Mesmerized, she watched as the sliding doors moved apart until the opening became a doorway, and then, after one last vibration, everything was still, except for water dripping somewhere. A breath of cool air rolled over them, bringing with it a faint leathery smell. A bit of light from one of the lamps fell into the inner chamber or whatever it was, but it wasn't enough to see anything.

"What's in there?"

The voice right behind her startled her - she hadn't heard Jackie come up.

"I - I don't know." She licked her dry lips, trying to sort the jumble of thoughts and emotions churning inside her into some semblance of order. "Damn. I wish we had a flashlight."

Gingerly, she stepped inside, with Jackie next to her, and peered into the darkness, not sure if there was anything there - not sure she wanted to find out. So far, all she could make out was a trickle of water dripping from a piece of rock in the cavern wall. Jackie held out a finger under the stream, then dipped it in her mouth.

" _Jackie_." Lynn shook her head.

Jackie scooped up a few more drops on her finger and licked it again. "It's just water."

"In a two-thousand year old crypt."

"Yeah." Jackie gave a short, nervous laugh. "With germs from a hydra. Okay, okay, you're right - "

Before she could finish, there was a "whoosh," and a soft orange-tinted light flared up and spread instantly inside the chamber. Lynn gasped and shrank back, almost knocking down Jackie.

There were six torches - torches that, somehow, had come to life all at once - mounted into the craggy walls of a chamber, or cavern, with a low arched ceiling. The chamber was bare, except that -

"Oh - my - God," Jackie breathed over her shoulder.

A man lay inside, or at least a human figure, stretched out on some kind of pelt on the stone floor.

Somehow, there had to be a way to make sense of this.

"Maybe it's a statue," Lynn said shakily. "Or - or a mummified - "

She didn't get to finish that thought because the man stirred and sighed. The chakram slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor.

 _Ares_ , said a voice in her head.

In a moment she was inside the cavern and at his side, kneeling on the thick fur. It was him, just the way she'd seen him in her vision: the black hair, the beard, the beautiful mouth, the dagger-shaped silver earring in his left ear. His eyes were closed but she could hear his breathing, could see his eyelashes quiver. She was beyond thinking at this point, beyond wondering how this could be - it just was - or whether she was dreaming; she was not. She knew only that he was here, and she was here, and that voice in her head was saying, _I know you_.

The bright light flashed again before Lynn's eyes; once again she was elsewhere, naked and relaxed in a tub of warm water in a room full of candles and draperies - and he was standing in front of her, his eyes intense, mesmerizing. She gasped at the sight of him. "I know you."

Another flash took her back to the cavern. _Maybe she was going mad._ That thought really should have worried her more, but for some reason it stayed far away in the back of her mind. She was on her knees in the tomb, looking down at him - at Ares - and then his eyes opened and he was looking at her. His eyes were brown, just as she knew they would be.

She wasn't sure how long they stayed like that, completely still, their eyes locked on each other. He looked slightly dazed at first, like someone trying to remember where or who he is; she watched as he moved his head and slowly lifted his hand, looking it over, flexing his fingers. Then he shifted his eyes back to Lynn, a hopeful, uncertain look in his face, as if he still weren't sure he was quite awake. She reached out impulsively to grab his hand, warm living flesh; his fingers closed around hers. He sat up, and before she could think anything, they were kissing.

This time the vision was brief - a vision of kissing him somewhere in a moonlit field, the air filled with the smell of wildflowers and the sounds of the night - and it merged quickly into the present, into _this_ kiss, the soft melting glow of this kiss here and now. When she pulled back, breathless and feverish, she saw the warm, still-disbelieving joy in his face, and it struck her that she was kneeling on the floor in a crypt kissing - whom? Someone who should have been dead for two thousand years, or wasn't supposed to exist at all - a hallucination - at best, a total stranger? She moved her hand away from his and covered her mouth. Then he spoke.

"Xena?"

His deep, smooth voice made her shiver. She had heard this voice so many times, saying that name; this time she was frightened. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms to her temples.

"Lynn," she said. "I'm Lynn."

He frowned. Did he even understand English? Maybe she should try ancient Greek - _wait, did she actually believe that this was an ancient Greek god who had slept in this chamber for two thousand years or so?_ Her mind was reeling again; as she tried to get a grip on something that was undeniably real, she thought of Jackie. And just then, she heard Jackie's voice. "Lynn?"

Lynn whipped around and saw Jackie standing a few feet away, her feet planted apart, her body rigid, as if she was standing on the ledge over a precipice and was afraid to move. She scrambled to her feet and came up to Jackie.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm - I don't know " - Jackie shook her head, then clutched at Lynn's arm, as if to steady herself. "I'm … what's going on?"

Lynn realized that she had no idea what to say.

"Xena." She flinched at the sound of Ares' voice behind her; it pulled her back into this other reality, the one where anything was possible and nothing made sense. She turned to see him getting up, gingerly and a bit stiffly.

"Oh my God," Jackie said hoarsely, her grip on Lynn's arm tightening convulsively.

Ares walked up to them, the torchlight giving his black leathers a golden sheen, sparkling in the metal studs of his vest. He was very tall, or maybe it was just that the cavern's rocky ceiling was so low.

"Jackie… it's all right." That was ridiculous, but she didn't know what else to say.

"Who is he?" Jackie asked in a plaintive half-whisper. Ares cocked his head, listening curiously.

"I - I'm not sure." Actually, she was pretty sure, except that the answer wasn't just incredible, it was insane. Lynn turned slowly to face him; she realized now that he was only slightly taller than she was. He was close enough that she could reach out and touch him, and a part of her was yearning to do just that.

" _You're back_ ," he said. The language was ancient Greek. " _You freed me._ "

"My God," Jackie said. "The dream... Lynn - this is what he looked like in my dream - Ares - "

Ares studied her thoughtfully for a moment; in the half-dark, his eyes seemed to twinkle with mischief. Then he turned to Lynn again, with a look that somehow managed to be both cocky and tender.

" _I've missed you._ "

She didn't know what to say to that; maybe she should have said that it wasn't her, but she didn't have the heart to say it, and besides - she wasn't sure of anything now. They stood still, the torches hissing faintly in the silence, the water still dripping on the rock. Finally, Ares said, " _Let's get out of here._ "

When he walked out, Lynn and Jackie remained glued to the spot, staring after him. He turned back and flashed them a grin.

" _Are you staying?_ "

Lynn started and took Jackie's arm. "Come on," she said, "let's go."

He waited for them in the outer chamber, facing the doorway, arms folded on his chest. When they were out, he held out his hand in an almost casual gesture. By now, Lynn was beyond shock as she watched the torches in the crypt flicker out and the sliding doors close again, their movement smooth and nearly soundless this time.

When the doorway had closed, Ares turned and slowly surveyed the chamber, as if the memory of this place were just coming back to him; his gaze lingered on the Xena mural, then wandered down to the chakram on the floor at Lynn's feet, and back to her face. His mouth creased slightly, hinting at a smile.

" _You_ _ **are**_ _back,"_ he said.

She had never spoken ancient Greek, and when she spoke her voice was hoarse with the effort. " _You think I'm Xena._ "

Just then, somewhere in Lynn's mind there stirred the dim thought that maybe the whole thing was a hoax, an elaborate prank - a fake scroll and an equally fake chakram, some kind of hidden mechanism to open the doors, a worker on the dig dressed up in black leather … it was, at least, a straw of sanity to clutch at. But Mario, pulling a stunt like that? And Jackie in on it - and those visions? Maybe they'd drugged her food, or … No, not even so much as a straw.

Ares arched a brow at her. Then he stared at the chakram. The disc moved jerkily, with the harsh sound of metal on rock, and rose up from the floor. It hovered low at first, then spun wildly and hurtled toward the far wall of the chamber - and back, flying straight at Lynn, a blur slicing through the air. Jackie yelped in fright. What happened next made no sense; Lynn knew only that her hand went up, by pure instinct, and clenched around the chakram's sharp blade.

The bright flash was upon her again, and she was looking into the stern, angular face of a sword-wielding dark-haired woman in a turban and silky white robes, under the cruel blue sky of the desert. "Only the _real_ Xena knows how to use the chakram!" the woman spat out. "Show them," Gabrielle said, smiling a little. She unhooked the chakram from her belt and sent it flying at a piece of rock, and -

The next flash did not return her to reality, whatever reality was. Instead, she was lying on snowy ground, wet, achy, cold, gasping for breath, and Gabrielle was bending over her with a smile of relief - there was a "whoosh" and she shot out her hand, snatching the chakram as Gabrielle flinched back. She turned to see Ares a few paces away, soaking wet and shivering, battered, miserable - her heart hurt for him - then that was gone too and she was in a dimly lit room that reeked of smoke. All her emotions tied into a hard knot of rage and resolve, she grabbed the chakram and hurled it at Ares as he swung his sword over a wounded girl crouched on the floor - _her child, Eve!_ The sword was knocked from his hand and he whipped around in shock, clutching at his bleeding arm. Another flash of white, and she was in another room in the same house, drenched from the rain, the chakram in her hand slick with blood; she watched, frozen in a nightmare, as Gabrielle swayed and started to fall.

The sharp pain in her hand made her snap out of it. Lynn blinked and shuddered and dropped the chakram; the blade had cut into her palm. Her eyes met Jackie's bewildered stare.

"Oh, Jackie - I'm so sorry - "

"Sorry about what? Lynn, are you okay? You looked like you were in some kind of a - trance or something…"

"I - I don't know - "

Jackie gestured toward her bloodied hand. "You've cut yourself - "

"I'll be fine."

Trying to steady her breath, she turned to Ares. He was still there, still real, the look on his face expectant and concerned. She narrowed her eyes at him.

" _Are_ _ **you**_ _doing this to me?_ "

Slowly, he shook his head and raised his hand to her face.

" _You remember,_ " he said, lightly stroking her cheek. His voice, his eyes, his touch were lulling her, spell-like.

Before he could say anything else, she thought she heard voices; Ares must have heard them too, because he tilted his head, listening. Then he brushed his finger over her lips, blew her a kiss and stepped back - and, in the next instant, he was gone in a burst of blue light.

Lynn and Jackie were still staring at the spot where he had stood when Mario came in from the passage connecting the underground chamber to the temple's upper level, two workers tagging along with him. He stopped in his tracks, looking from Lynn and Jackie to the chakram on the floor and the empty space on the wall. After a few moments of stunned silence, he muttered some Italian expression of shock - probably quite a rude one - and then said, "Lynn? What happened?"

 **TO BE CONTINUED**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> X X X

X X X

Chakram in hand, Xena stared ahead, a look of intense focus on her face. Next to her stood Gabrielle, her long reddish blond hair swept by the wind.

"Look at that." Jackie nodded at the mural. "Funny, isn't it. We get back to town, and - there's this."

"Funny?" Lynn pressed her glass of cold, dark beer to her cheek, its chill oddly soothing. "You can find lots of Xena images in any town in Greece. She _is_ something of a national hero."

Jackie sipped her wine, looking pensively at the picture. Then she tossed her head slightly and turned back to Lynn.

"I hope they bring the food soon. I'm starving."

The restaurant at the Thessaloniki Holiday Inn was nearly empty; it wasn't really dinnertime yet, but Lynn and Jackie hadn't eaten since leaving the site of the dig, and it had been a long drive.

They had spent five days at the site, going over the scrolls, taking notes in a marathon work session. Then the work was done, and Lynn had told Mario (who was still puzzling over just how the chakram simply came off the wall when she touched it) that they would head back to Thessaloniki right away. Mario had driven them to the hotel - a journey past sloping hills cluttered with matchbox-like suburban houses, and then along the city's wide avenues where the traffic lived a boisterous life of its own, past the glitter of modern shops and the reddish domes of medieval churches - and dropped them off with a flourish of operatic good-byes and good wishes. The flight back to New York was in three days.

Jackie stared down pensively, light spots from the chandelier dancing in her wine glass. Then she said, "Don't you think we should talk about it?"

Lynn could have said, "About what?", but she didn't want to play games. Maybe that was really why they had worked on the scrolls at such a frenetic pace, not just because they wanted to finish as quickly as possible. That way, they didn't have time to talk.

"If you want," she said, her voice level.

Jackie looked up, her face tense with a kind of nervous resolution, as if she were bracing herself for a jump. "Look - we can't just pretend nothing happened. We went into a two-thousand-year-old tomb - and there was a _man_ in there. And - he woke up."

"Yeah, I know," Lynn said. What else was there to say, really? She picked up the fork on the table and turned it in her hands, running a finger along the dull edge of the metal. "We saw _something_. But Jackie, I don't know - maybe it was…" She didn't know what to say next. Every explanation she had tried playing out in her head crumbled the moment one poked at it.

"Maybe it was what?"

"I don't know."

"Lynn…" Jackie paused and sighed. "It's not just that. There's something I haven't told you - "

The waiter came up bearing the appetizers. He was elegant and dignified and took forever to put down the plates, and Lynn was suddenly beside herself. Jackie was about to tell her something - obviously something that had to do with this whole thing, with Ares, with Xena - and she had to keep herself from snapping at the waiter to go away. Finally, he did.

"Well?"

Jackie gave her a sheepish glance. "Please don't laugh…"

"I won't." She wasn't sure she was up to laughing at anything now.

"I've had more dreams."

"Dreams," Lynn said quietly. She knew what was coming next. Dreams in which -

"Dreams in which I'm Gabrielle," Jackie blurted out. "God, some of them were just awful…" She rubbed her face and shivered. "The crucifixion… the time after Hope killed Solan and you tried to - " She quickly caught herself. "Uh, I meant when Xena tried - tried - "

"Jackie," Lynn said firmly. She was _not_ going to get agitated over this. "We've been reading Gabrielle's scrolls, day in and day out." Lynn took a cheese puff from her plate and bit off a piece. "Don't you think it that explains it? That it makes sense that you'd dream about these things?"

"But Xe- "

Jackie's voice broke off abruptly but it was too late. Even unfinished, the word was still there, slashed into what remained of the fabric of reality. They sat frozen for a moment, Lynn struck speechless, Jackie looking utterly terrified.

Finally, Jackie cleared her throat and said, in an unnaturally bright voice, "But Lynn…" She paused long enough to take another sip of wine, and scrunched up her eyebrows as if she didn't quite remember what she was going to say next. "It was so lifelike. Those dreams, I mean."

Lynn sat still, her eyes half-closed. She wanted to tell Jackie that she had had dreams too, wonderful, horrible dreams in which she was Xena - dreams in which she fought and killed, and rushed frantically into a cabin to find her son dead on the floor, and watched Callisto sink into quicksand pleading for help - in which she taught Gabrielle to fish and they splashed around in a lake, laughing - in which she desperately hugged Gabrielle, back from the dead - in which she and Ares made passionate love, or faced each other in anger and pain… With a start, she opened her eyes. If she told Jackie, there would be no turning back.

"I'll be right back," she said.

In the restaurant's spacious, sparkling bathroom, she bent down over a sink and splashed cold water on her face. Then she stood up straight and faced the mirror, studying her own face as if it weren't quite hers: the angular cheekbones, the strong mouth, the light grey eyes. The water trickled from her chin, dripping down the open collar of her shirt. Did she really look like the warrior woman in those murals, minus the long jet-black hair? Obviously, Ares thought she was Xena … if that was really Ares. _How totally insane._ She closed her eyes for a moment, then shut the water off and wiped her face with a paper towel.

"Ares," she whispered to herself.

And then it hit her, an overwhelming sense of a presence next to her, of being watched, almost touched - an awareness that shot through every nerve in her body like an electrical charge. She stiffened and said in a loud, hard voice that seemed to come from somewhere else, "Come out right now!"

"I beg your pardon?" said a shocked, British-accented female voice behind her. The presence she had felt was gone abruptly, as if a switch had been turned off. Lynn turned around and saw a pair of sensible brown shoes in one of the stalls. Her face blazing, she fled the bathroom before her embarrassment could be complete.

Back at the table, Jackie looked tense and anxious. "Are you okay?"

"Yes." Lynn sat down, picked up her beer glass and slowly drank what was left, then absent-mindedly slipped another cheese puff in her mouth. _She had to tell Jackie._ She pushed the plate aside, looked up, and forced out the words. "I've had dreams too."

Jackie stared, simultaneously aghast and relieved. "About Xena?" she asked in a hushed voice. "I mean - about … being Xena?"

She nodded reluctantly. "Yeah."

Jackie digested this for a moment, her face animated by a multitude of emotions - fear, excitement, utter bewilderment, joy, disbelief. In her spellbound state, she tipped over her wine glass, flooding Lynn's plate, and sat up with a start.

"Oh God - I'm sorry…"

"That's all right. Cheese puffs in white wine - not too bad."

Jackie leaned back in her chair, a blurry pensive look coming over her face.

"So do you think it's true…" she muttered, more as a statement than a question.

Lynn was gripped by a surge of unaccountable irritation. "Do I think _what's_ true? That we're reincarnations of Xena and Gabrielle? And that we just met Ares, God of War? For heaven's sake, Jackie - what do you expect me to say? Do you really believe in this?"

"I read this line once." Jackie rested her chin on the back of her hand, in the philosophical pose of Rodin's _Thinker_. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Or something like that."

"That's good to know."

"Xena … Uh, Lynn…" It wasn't quite as bad the second time around. "Look. I know this sounds totally insane and everything, but - well - "

"Go on."

"Maybe you should try calling Ares."

After a brief, uneasy silence, Lynn said evenly, "I tried."

"What? When - where?"

Lynn stared down at her soggy plate. "Just now, in the - umm…" _As if this wasn't already ridiculous enough._ "In the - restroom."

"Lynn!" Jackie looked genuinely shocked. "What do you think he is, some kind of pervert who hangs around ladies' rooms?"

Rather to her own surprise, Lynn felt a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "We'll see about that."

"What?"

"Nothing." She felt almost giddy; the memory of that earlier sensation, that presence she had sensed, filled her with warm excitement. Then that subsided, and when her eyes met Jackie's she was scared.

"You want another wine?" she asked.

"Sure." Jackie paused, then reached out and touched Lynn's hand. Her voice was hushed. "You know what's funny. When I was a kid, I had this idea that I came from someplace else. It's not that I didn't love Mom and Dad - I did, really. I just had this fantasy … like - I was from some other world and they were just raising me…"

"What, like Superman? The girl from planet Krypton?"

"Or the Star-Child. You know, the Oscar Wilde story."

Lynn didn't know the story, and Jackie started telling her: A poor peasant saw a star fall while walking in the woods one night, and then found a baby in a basket, wrapped in a golden cloth embroidered with stars. He and his wife adopted the baby and called him Star-Child; and the beautiful boy grew up selfish, vain, and heartless, until he was punished for his cruelty and put through a harsh test, until he is willing to risk his life for unselfish love and compassion. It wasn't like Lynn to be enthralled by a fairy tale, but this one struck a chord in a way she couldn't quite explain.

After that, over dinner and coffee, they got to talking about other things, and Lynn found herself telling Jackie about parts of her life she hardly ever discussed with anyone: her relationship with Peter, and before that with a charming, sociable journalist whose cynicism she had initially mistaken for courage; and the fact that when she was six, her mother, a nurse in a small New Jersey town, had embarked on a spiritual quest that took her to California and never brought her back. As they got up from the table, she wondered what had made her open up like that. It felt strange, almost as if she had been talking about someone else.

X X X

"What are we going to do tomorrow?"

They waited for the elevator, standing next to a shiny, fake-looking potted palm tree. A group of tourists from some Eastern European country had just arrived at the hotel, and the lobby was filling with a tide of talk and clatter.

"I was thinking - " Lynn raised her voice slightly - "we can go over our notes. Talk about how we're going to incorporate this into the book."

Jackie shot her an alarmed look. "Incorporate -"

" - the scrolls," Lynn said evenly. "The new material from the scrolls."

Jackie looked relieved, then amused and slightly exasperated. "You want to spend a beautiful day in a hotel room poring over our notes?"

"We did come here to work," Lynn said weakly. She didn't even want to think about how to incorporate … the rest of it into the book. She had always automatically assumed, of course, that Xena and Gabrielle's up-close-and-personal relationship with Ares and other gods was a flight of Gabrielle's poetic fancy, or maybe a symbolic representation of the real story. How the hell was she supposed to deal with it now?

"It's here," Jackie said.

Lynn flinched a little and then saw the elevator doors opening in front of them. She followed Jackie inside. They had been given rooms on different floors, Jackie on the fourth, Lynn on the seventh.

"Come on, there is so much to see," Jackie said as the elevator started up with a low hum. "The Roman ruins, the mosques, the tower - the archeological museum is nearby, and there's a Byzantine - "

"You're right. Let's do the museums."

"Oh yeah? Great!" Jackie beamed at Lynn, every bit the bright-eyed girl who had stepped into her office a hundred years ago, and looking at her one could almost believe that life would just go on as usual. The elevator thumped to a halt, and Jackie said, "See you tomorrow, then."

"See you then. Sleep well."

As the doors were closing, Jackie turned to call out, "Good night, Lynn!"

"Good night."

Left alone in the small wood-paneled cubicle, Lynn fidgeted, tugging at the collar of her shirt. Throughout dinner, especially when she and Jackie started talking about personal things, she had been dogged sense of _déjà vu_.

 _Jackie thought they had been Xena and Gabrielle in their previous lives. What if…_

Lynn almost groaned aloud. She couldn't think about it - not now.

She realized that the elevator had stopped; she barely had time to hold the door open before it slid shut again.

 _Stop it, just stop it,_ she told herself, actually moving her lips to form the soundless words.

She slid her card into the door slot and went into the darkened room. It wasn't that late - just after nine. She was going to watch the news and then look over her notes from the scrolls. Or maybe find a good movie to watch, or -

Lynn's hand froze on its way to the light switch. It was back - that weird, thrilling, scary sensation from before. _He_ was back.

She tried to resist. She would turn on the light and there would be nothing - no one there.

Sharply, she flipped the switch. All the lamps in the room came on at once.

He was sitting in the armchair by the window; not so much sitting as reclining in a casual lazy pose, one leg slung over the side of the chair, reflections from the lamp glittering faintly in the metal studs of his vest and in the gemstones on the hilt of the sword at his belt. She wasn't as shocked as she should have been.

"It's you," she said, almost matter-of-factly.

He grinned. "Hello to you too."

She raised an eyebrow. "You speak English."

"You're not the only one with many skills."

He sat up. She walked toward him and then stopped, throwing her purse down on a chair. "You think I'm Xena."

"I know you are." He paused. "You know it too, don't you?" She thought she heard a hint of pleading in his voice, but when she looked into his eyes they twinkled with amusement.

"Were you watching me - before?" She felt herself blushing.

He was smiling. "Oh yeah. You can still pick up on that, can't you." Switching to Greek, he added, " _You know you were always the only mortal who could._ " For a moment his eyes were serious, and he seemed to search her face for a hint of acknowledgment.

"I was in the women's room," she snapped. "You can't _do_ that."

"Do what?"

"Any of it. All of it!"

"You're the one who called _me_ ," he said.

"I did not!"

"Sure you did. You said my name."

 _She had, hadn't she? What had she been thinking?_ Lynn sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed her hands to her forehead.

"Tell me," Ares said. "How did you get to the temple? What were you doing there?"

With a sigh, she looked up. "I'm a historian. I'm doing research on Xena."

"And it led you there."

"They found Gabrielle's scrolls. And the chakram… I had to come over. I live in another country," she said defensively. "On the other side of the ocean."

Ares nodded, rubbing his chin. Softly, he said, "I knew you'd come back." Their eyes met silently; unnerved, she looked away. He went on, his voice brighter now, with a touch of teasing, "I knew you'd find it – it's what you do."

 _Stop it._ Lynn stood up brusquely and turned to face him. "I want you to do something for me."

"Oh?" He looked up at her, attentive, waiting.

"Come down with me to the lounge," she said. "Where other people can see you. I want to know that I'm not out of my mind."

He rose and came up to her, so close that he could have held out a hand and touched her. She could feel his closeness physically, almost as if there were some aura radiating from him and she could feel it on her skin - or maybe it was just a trick of her mind. He didn't touch her.

"So now you think this isn't real?" He sounded hurt but she wasn't sure if he was serious or teasing her again; and then his expression changed to a wry grin. "So tell me - _Lynn_ \- which one of us is making this up?"

"Please."

"All right."

On the way to the door, she stopped. "Wait - you can't go dressed like that."

"Well, that wouldn't matter if I wasn't real, would it?"

"Ares…" she said impatiently.

The smirk on his face faded, and he was now looking at her with a small, warm smile that barely touched the corners of his mouth. With a mock shrug of resignation, he unbuckled his swordbelt and let it drop to the carpeted floor, and Lynn suppressed a gasp, wondering if he was about to take his clothes off. He straightened up and threw his head back. The black of his leathers blurred for a moment, as if a picture had gone out of focus, and then he was dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt with the same design as the one she'd worn to the temple - the red and gold Chinese dragon.

She stared, and chuckled in spite of herself. "Why that?"

He shrugged. "I like the look." When they were leaving the room, he added, "When I first saw you wearing that, I wondered if you were a warrior in the army of Ch'in."

"I am not a warrior." Lynn slammed the door behind her and made for the elevator. "Ch'in… No, I've never been to China - I got this in Chinatown…" She realized that she had no idea how much he knew of the modern world - and, in the same flash, that she was actually thinking of him as an ancient god awake in the twenty-first century. "In a Chinese quarter in a big city," she said. "In a souvenir shop."

At the very least Ares seemed to be familiar with elevators, because he readily stepped inside and watched Lynn push the lobby button.

"I'll say one thing," he said. "Being mortal is a lot easier than it used to be. You don't have to walk everywhere."

"That's right," she said. "Pretty soon, we'll forget how."

He gave her an amused glance. Their eyes met then, and she didn't want to turn away. There was mischief in his expression, and tenderness, and more.

The slight jolt of the elevator coming to a halt broke the spell. She turned around and stepped out. He followed, no questions asked.

They walked into the hotel oak-paneled lounge, amber-hued in the low lighting. A platinum blonde coming toward them, in stiletto heels, a low-buttoned shirt and makeup that made her look like a mannequin, ogled Ares so brazenly that Lynn's experiment instantly became pointless - or, perhaps, was an instant success. For better or worse, others could see him. Glancing sideways, she saw him look back at the woman, with cool condescending amusement but also with frank recognition of her stare, and she was annoyed.

She could have turned back; but at this point it would have felt ridiculous, and besides, she didn't think she wanted to be alone with him just yet. Now that she knew he was real, she … well, in a movie or a novel, she would have needed a stiff drink, though she wasn't sure how getting her brain addled even more was supposed to help.

The lounge was half-empty, a soft din of voices hanging in the air. The woman at the piano began to play a soulful Gershwin tune. Lynn looked around and waved awkwardly toward a free corner table; they sat down in the plush armchairs on opposite sides of it, staring silently at each other. When the waiter came up, Lynn asked for a double espresso; there wasn't much of a chance she'd go to sleep anytime soon. The waiter again confirmed Ares' existence with a "What about you, sir?"

Ares gave her a wry teasing look, as if to say, "Are you happy now?", and then said, "The same."

When the waiter left, Lynn glanced at Ares and caught herself grinning a little. "Do you know what you just ordered?"

He raised an eyebrow slightly. "No. But I figured I can trust you."

"Really - based on what?" Some part of her that listened from the outside could hear the teasing husky touch in her own tone. Was she _bantering_ with him?

"Old memories," he said, leaning back.

 _I love you,_ said a voice in her head. It was the only thing she could think just then, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to say it to him - and at least for a moment, it was exhilarating.

"So," he said. "What exactly are we about to drink? Curdled cow's blood? Melted fish guts? Brew of soldiers' boots?"

She smirked. "You'll find out soon enough. Patience is a virtue."

"Oh, I've got plenty," he said. "You ought to know."

Uncharacteristically flustered, Lynn was grateful when the waiter interrupted them. She told him to put it on her room bill, then picked up the cup and breathed in the heady roasted aroma. How would a strong brew like that taste to someone who'd never had coffee before? She sipped it, and watched with amusement as Ares sniffed suspiciously at his cup and finally took a sip. He winced and grimaced, and gave her a scandalized look.

"Brew of soldiers' boots was pretty close."

"Don't knock it," she said. "It's supposed to be good for the fighting spirit."

"I can see why. It would keep me pissed off all right."

"That'll teach you to trust a stranger," she said.

The music had stopped and there was a momentary hush, except for the distant murmur of voices from the other side of the lounge. Lynn put down the cup; it clanked slightly on the table's glass surface.

"A stranger." He looked at her intently. "Do you always kiss strangers?"

 _Kiss -_

A hot flush scalded her face and neck. She had kissed him, back there in the tomb, their fingers intertwined, the warmth of his hand seeping into her skin … Another memory came to her, only this time it wasn't some overpowering vision of another place and time but a memory like any other: she was on top of him on a couch, kissing him, diving down to kiss his chest, his hands roaming her body and making a slow fever rise and spread under her skin, and then there was an explosion of noise and light, and - she tossed her head and forced herself back to the present.

The pianist began to play again, a lush Italian song this time. Lynn looked at Ares, at his mouth, his lips parted in a hint of a smile. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to touch him, to feel his hands on her. She wanted him.

Her hand was shaking slightly when she picked up her cup and gulped down the rest of the coffee.

"Let's go back to my room," she said.

For just a moment Ares looked startled, then pleased; then uncertain.

"Just like that?" he said.

"Just like that."

"That's - very tempting," he said. She expected some kind of follow-up, some kind of "but…", and recoiled inwardly; but he rose from his chair without saying anything else.

The blood pounded in Lynn's ears as they walked to the elevator. Maybe she was crazy after all … having visions of herself as a long-dead Greek warrior princess - about to take a man back to her room when she'd only met him a few days ago … Her face was blazing, and she actually felt embarrassed when a casually dressed middle-aged woman walking by with her husband glanced at them - as if she could read it all in her face.

Maybe some part of her, somewhere, was still hoping that it would all turn out to be a dream. The scary thing was that another part of her didn't want it to be.

They waited for the elevator, just the two of them. Her shoulder brushed his and she shivered.

"So you're a historian and you study Xena," he said. After a pause, he added wryly, "And you used to think _I_ was an egomaniac."

She turned to face him. Underneath the cool ironic expression, there was something almost apprehensive in his look.

"You mean, you're not?" she said.

"So you do remember."

"I remember," she said quietly, without thinking. She wasn't sure _what_ she remembered; but just then she knew, with a hard finality that made her chest tighten, that nothing would ever be the same. She would go back to the States, try to get her life back on track - but there was really no going back, not since she'd walked into that damn crypt; he had made sure of that. She hadn't really been in charge of anything since then. Of course, she could change that now. She could send him back. She still had that choice.

The elevator was here. She lingered for a moment, then stepped inside. He followed and the doors slid shut, and they were alone. Ares stood behind her, not actually touching her - _yet -_ butshe could feel his nearness like a touch, a caress.

Brusquely, she turned around, pulled his head down and kissed his mouth.

He made a muffled, startled sound that became a low moan. When she pulled away and opened her eyes, she could see what she was doing to him - his face clouded and transformed by desire, his breathing labored - and the knowledge that she had this power turned to elation. With a bit of shock, she realized that he was back in his leathers. She slid her hand in the opening in his vest and stroked his chest, feeling the heat of his skin and the softness of his hair, feeling the small shudder of his response to her touch.

"Xena - " he gasped.

He pulled her toward him almost roughly, her whole body pressed against his, his hands moving down her back, his eyes searching her face, and she felt a powerful rush of excitement. He paused, holding her, still a trace of doubt in his expression; then it was gone, replaced by an intensity that jolted her. To stop now, to push him away now would be like refusing to breathe. _Why do you continue to deny us,_ he had said to her once. He leaned forward and they kissed again, greedily, joyfully.

The elevator stopped and they pulled apart with a hushed laugh, both of them out of breath.

As the doors closed behind them and they walked down the hallway, Lynn felt a tug of anxiety. She still didn't know him - she'd found him in some two-thousand-year-old tomb in Greece - she still couldn't be sure she wasn't insane - he called her Xena … these thoughts stirred in her mind and gave one last twitch, and were gone.

"Ares," she said. It felt good, saying his name.

He glanced at her, curiously and a little warily, and she grinned at him in response.

Then they were at her door, and she reached into her purse and the card key wasn't there.

Lynn groped inside the purse in quick sharp movements - wallet - pen - comb - sticky piece of candy - notepad - nothing. Suddenly nervous, she looked up at Ares. His puzzled look turned to a frown. "What?"

"The door's - locked. I left the key inside."

She didn't believe in signs, but -

He stared at her, maybe trying to figure out if this was yet another game, and finally smirked. "Perfect. Now I get to watch you kick down the door."

She didn't believe in signs from God, but maybe some part of her, the still-rational part, had done this on purpose - so that she'd have to stop, have time to come to her senses. The thoughts she had pushed away were back, all at once. She didn't know him - he called her Xena - she'd found him in some ancient tomb - she was losing her mind. _She didn't know him._

"No," she said quietly, flatly. "No."

There was a strange look in his eyes; no anger but a kind of hurt, and a touch of warmth - concern - more than that. He stepped closer and reached out to touch her face. "Xena - "

" _No!_ " She clutched at her purse, holding it up in front of her as if it could be a shield. She hadn't felt such terror since that time she'd almost drowned as a child - or since the nightmares she'd had about it for the next few years.

"Leave," she said, her voice choked. "Leave now." She paused a moment, struggling for breath. " _Please._ "

For a moment all emotion was gone from his face; it was perfectly still, perfectly closed. Then, there was a strange sound, like a harsh gust of wind, and a blue light flared up about him and burst; and when the smoke and the glare had cleared, then there was nothing but empty air. _Come back_ , she wanted to say.

Lynn leaned back against the door and closed her eyes, letting out a long breath. She had to go down to the lobby and get a new card key; but she felt too weak, and her legs wouldn't move.

X X X

Ares watched her for a moment, from the far end of the hallway where she couldn't sense him - if she could sense him at all in this life. She had before … but maybe it was just a flash, a memory of their former bond that had come and gone.

He materialized in an empty corner of a ground-floor hallway, changing his leathers to simple black, and strode briskly into the lobby. For some reason he wanted, right now, to be visible to mortal eyes.

He stepped through the revolving doors and under the hotel's massive golden portico. There were voices and laughter; four or five barely dressed, suntanned, giggly blondes were clustered by one of the columns, engaged in this new world's odd ritual of puffing at burning white sticks and blowing out the smoke. Snatches of raspy music drifted from a lonely white taxicab parked by the sidewalk. Ares walked past it and down the wide street lined with quiet dark trees. The city greeted him with its still-open, still-noisy cafes, the still-lit windows of closed shops, the never-sleeping signs on the buildings shimmering in red and blue and green. In the distance, Thessaloiniki's majestic White Tower rose against the night sky, Cars whooshed by, their huge round eyes bathing the night in white beams. For an instant the sight of these horseless chariots racing at great speed jolted him - even though a few days earlier, on his first visit to one of the great cities of this new world, he'd gotten used to these things after about five minutes.

Something felt different. The lights and the colors were brighter somehow, the sounds more vivid, the cooling night air with a touch of sea breeze more alive on his face and bare arms; and in his mind he could see _her_ more clearly, this maddening woman he had left behind in the hallway, this woman who was Xena and not Xena.

His chest hurt. That was different too. As the breath caught in his throat, it hit him that he hadn't truly felt much of anything from the moment he had woken up in his tomb and until now - except maybe for that first joy when he saw her and knew her, and knew that _she_ knew _him_. After that, everything had been a bit off; even when he realized that her companion was Gabrielle reborn; even when Xena - this Xena who was Lynn, this Lynn who was Xena - caught the chakram. It was as if he had been watching everything through a wall of glass, as if everything else around him had been real but he hadn't been quite there. Even his pursuit of Xena … He had known in his mind that his goal was to get her back, and he had desired her, of course - but this desire had not, until now, become yearning.

And then … and then she had touched him, kissed him - he had held her in his arms - and just when he thought he had her back, she was gone.

Now, at last, he was fully awake, and it hurt.

Trying to make some sense of his jumbled thoughts, he walked faster. A loud screech made him halt abruptly and turn, and he found himself staring at one of those machines, its glowing eyes less than two paces away. The man inside leaned out and shouted, in the new Greek dialect of this age, "What are you trying to do, asshole - kill yourself?"

It should have been amusing; but now it annoyed him, being insulted by some pathetic mortal whose ancestors had probably groveled at his altars. Ares clenched his fists and vanished in shards of light, no doubt leaving the man to gape in bewilderment.

The city's lights and sounds melted into a glittering whirlwind around him. At the very moment he took himself into the ether, he knew where he would go.

The temple where he had slept was dark and deserted; those damn vultures who had dug up the place had long ended their work shift. He could have lit their lamps - there wasn't much of a trick to it - but instead, he waved a hand and created dozens of candles and oil lamps. There was something soothing about their soft wavering glow; almost enough to fool himself into thinking that he was back in the time when he was still the true God of War, and when the Warrior Princess lived.

He came up to the mural of the Salonae battle and stood staring at the painting of Xena. Beautiful, so beautiful - her features sharpened by that focused battle-rage he knew so well, her body taut with energy, her hair swept by the wind. He raised his hand to touch her face - to touch cold, centuries-old stone - and it was almost more than one could endure. The memories burst open in his mind: the moment when he knew, though still refusing to admit it to himself, that she was dead; the moment when he actually saw her, her face waxen, an ugly, ragged crimson gash on the side of her neck, that beautiful hair matted with thick blood, her limbs awkward and stiff; dead, completely and irrevocably dead, beyond any power or remedy he had.

Closing his eyes, Ares pressed his palms and his forehead to the rough wall. It was back now, all of it. The disbelief, the pain that ripped into his chest and stayed there - _he had lost her before, but not like this, not when they'd been so close to everything he had wanted –_ the awful sound of Gabrielle's choked, shuddering sobs which he couldn't shut out – the moment when he reached out to touch Xena's cold pale face, and was suddenly seized by a black, horrifying anger at her - because she would be at peace wherever she had gone, and had left him to suffer; because she'd been too stubborn to accept his gift of immortality.

At some point after that, he was numb to any further pain, and even when he watched the flames of the funeral pyre lick at her hair and billow around her body, there was nothing but the dull knowledge that it was over. He wasn't sure when the thought formed consciously in his mind that he did not want to go on like this. From that point on, he had carried out his plan almost mechanically, not allowing himself to feel much of anything, except at the very end when he spoke to Gabrielle.

His plan had worked as well as he could have possibly hoped. Xena's soul was reborn in this woman, and still had its connection to the chakram: she had been able to take it and unlock the doorway, and awaken him - all as planned. He was back, she was back - he had found her, or rather she had found him - all as planned - and for what? She had almost Xena's spirit, and almost Xena's looks, and by now many of Xena's memories - but she wasn't really Xena, maybe never would be. And then what? What did he have left?

He had seen enough, here in Greece and on a short visit to Rome, to know that this world had no room for the Olympian gods, except as curiosities from a time long past. His once-majestic temple on the Roman Forum, built by Augustus and Livia, now lay in ruins, bright green lizards scurrying over the dirt-streaked wreckage of the marble columns; when he checked the place out, it was mobbed by gawking, chattering travelers apparently from the land east of Ch'in, armed with those tiny boxes that could capture images of things. An oily guide regaled them with tales about the temple's history, including a completely made-up story about how " _la leggendaria Xena_ " and Livia had fought each other here. Listening to him, it was quite obvious that the man didn't believe - no, didn't even admit the possibility - that the ancient gods had ever been real.

The mortals still had their temples (Rome was full of them), but he didn't care much if they worshipped the God of Eli or some other deity. They still had wars, using machines that could rain death from the skies as only the gods could have done once - machines no sane War God would have ever allowed to get into mortal hands - but they wouldn't dream of calling on him, and he cared nothing about their wars or their other affairs.

Ares stepped away from the wall. Xena's eyes sparkled at him and her hair seemed to move in the wind; but of course it was only the shimmering reflection of those candles and lamps. Mortals, in this age, had learned to capture moving images and sounds; one could preserve any moment and then watch it again and again on a screen, rather like watching distant things through a portal as the gods could do. _If he could watch Xena like that… or maybe that would be even worse._ With a sigh, he wandered idly to another mural, depicting the battle at Thebes when the city was under siege by seven rival kings. A slain warrior lay in the foreground, an enemy spear protruding from his chest, his bloodied sword still clutched in his hand. In the dim light, the painted blood looked almost black.

He turned and looked at the wall that had sealed his tomb. At least he was alive. At least _she_ was alive.

At his command, the crypt's stale air solidified into the ornate throne that had once stood in this temple's main hall. He sprawled in it, leaning back, closing his eyes. He thought of the first time Xena had let him take her to his halls on Olympus, the time he wanted to give her up and she came back. They had made love in a throne much like this one - _Xena leaning toward him, her long black hair brushing his shoulders and his chest, her eyes shining, her lips parted in tenderness and desire - the lamplight giving her skin a soft golden sheen, her breasts heavy in his palms_ \- he groaned aloud and banged his fist on the lion paw-shaped armrest. That was the last thing he needed right now.

He sat up and conjured a goblet of red wine. Its strong, tangy taste brought him back to reality.

He could pursue her as she was. But it would be too much like replacing Xena with someone else. He had already tried that once, with Callisto; and even though he had no thoughts of love back then, he knew enough to know that this was not what he wanted.

He would get her back; he had to get her back. But how? Was there anything he could do? If he came to Lynn again, if he tried to make her remember, all it would probably do was raise her defenses. Maybe, for now, the best thing to do was leave her alone, stay away as long as he could bear it. Xena was in there - she had to be. Some day, she'd be ready. Maybe, this time, he had to learn how to wait.

X X X

Lynn sounded barely awake when Jackie called her at ten to ask if she was coming down for breakfast; when she did come down, her face puffy, bluish circles under the eyes, Jackie couldn't help asking, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, fine," Lynn said curtly, avoiding her eyes.

There was an awkward silence as she sat down and rubbed her cheek, and absently poured herself a cup of coffee. Then, finally, she said, "I didn't get much sleep."

Before Jackie could ask what was wrong, Lynn had risen brusquely and was walking to the buffet table to get her food.

They didn't talk as they ate, and Lynn didn't seem to have much of an appetite; she picked apart a muffin and poked her fork at the fried eggs and sausage, staring away. Something had happened, Jackie could tell; something that had to do with all this - with the temple, with Xena - with Ares. It scared her, and yet she also wanted it to be true. Her chest was tight with anticipation. She could ask; but then, Lynn might get defensive and say nothing.

Finally, she couldn't take it anymore and blurted out, "What happened?"

Lynn looked up miserably.

"I - I should see a psychiatrist when I get home," she said dully.

Jackie was torn between feeling bad for Lynn - she'd never seen her so subdued - and wanting, dying to know more. She knew, _just knew_ -

"Did you see - _him_?" she asked in a near-whisper. The waitress came up with the coffee and gave her an odd look.

Lynn waited until the waitress had left. Then she looked up again. The scared look in her eyes startled Jackie, making her feel guilty about her excitement.

"Jackie, I'm going insane. Those dreams, and _this_ \- " she shook her head, as if trying to get rid of the invading visions - "what else could it be?"

In her anxiety, Jackie took too big a gulp of coffee, and the hot sting of the bittersweet liquid made her wince.

"What happened?"

"It was just - so vivid." Lynn shook her head and moved her plate aside. "He was in my room, we went down to the bar and had coffee…"

Jackie felt like laughing. "You had coffee with _Ares_?"

"Shh, don't - " Lynn said imploringly.

"Oh my God." She couldn't resist. "Did you, uh - did you and he - "

"I kissed him," Lynn said evenly.

Jackie sat still. The memory came to her, so clear, so real, more real than any of these dreams and visions had been until now: They sat over breakfast in a dining room at an inn, just like this - well, not like this, some village inn and a half-dark stuffy room with rough wooden tables - and they were talking … talking about -

"Jackie?" Lynn's voice pulled her back to reality. "What?"

She gasped slightly. "Don't you remember? It was just like this - we were having breakfast at an inn, and - " she paused as more of it came back to her, not quite like the memories of _this_ life but still clear, still real enough - "I was upset because I'd knocked on your door that morning and you were in bed with him - "

Lynn gave her an exasperated look. "Gabrielle, could you say that a little louder? I don't think everyone heard."

Jackie became aware of a middle-aged couple at the next table, watching them with rather blatant curiosity; but even more, in the same instant, she was aware of what Lynn had said. She looked her straight in the eye, and knew for certain that Lynn remembered, too.

" _I don't understand this, but I'll be there for you_." She paused. "That's what I told you."

"At a lake…" Lynn's voice was hushed, a near-whisper.

"You went to see him that evening. You remember, don't you?"

Lynn sat up abruptly, her face suddenly hard, and with a touch of awe Jackie thought that she had never looked so much like Xena. " _No_."

Jackie nearly groaned; it was like a door slamming in her face, a door that led to something rich and strange. "You called me Gabrielle."

"What? When?"

"Just now! You didn't even notice? You said 'Gabrielle, could you say that a little louder?'"

"I said _Jackie_."

"You _didn't_! You sa-" - she trailed off and then lowered her voice, in response to Lynn's impatient shushing gesture - "you said, Gabrielle."

Lynn sighed and looked down. When she raised her head, the harshness was gone from her face and she looked, once again, gentle and a little frightened.

"Please let's not talk about it … not here."

"Sure - you're right, I'm sorry… Are you okay?"

Lynn picked up her fork and poked it at a piece of fried egg. "I'm fine."

They didn't talk about it, or about much else, for hours after that; except that Jackie kept playing out conversations with Lynn in her head, thinking of things to say, things that could get through to her. Finally, that afternoon, when they were at the museum standing in front of a badly timeworn one-armed statue of Ares carved from black stone, she said, "Lynn."

A very brief pause, and then, "Yes?"

"You know" - she turned and glanced at Lynn - "if you want to find out if your … experience last night was real, we could ask some people at the bar. I'm sure someone would - "

"Ask them what?" Lynn kept her eyes on the statue. "Would they please confirm if I was there last night with - " her voice broke off for a moment - "a tall, dark and handsome stranger?"

Lynn's face was unreadable. Frustrated, Jackie shook her head. "You don't _want_ to confirm it, do you? Because then you'd have to believe it's real. Is it actually easier for you to think you're going insane?"

Lynn said nothing. After a long, awkward moment, she turned and they walked on, away from the statue; then, finally, she spoke.

"It's not about what's easier. It's about what makes sense."

"You think we both had the same hallucination?" Jackie said softly. "That actually makes sense to you?"

"I - I don't know, Jackie. There is such a thing as mass delusions…" She trailed off and sighed. "Anyway, when I'm back in New York, I'm seeing a doctor."

X X X

Lynn did go to see a doctor; but not in New York, and not right away.

Two days after her return from Greece, she went to see her father. She took the train to South Orange, and a cab to the one-story house where Richard Doyle, high school history teacher and former girls' basketball coach, lived with his two Labradors, his overflowing collection of books and magazines, and his antique radios. He came out to the door in a faded White Mountains, New Hampshire T-shirt, the dogs Caesar and Livia barking happily and dancing around him; there was a merry sparkle in his still-young gray eyes as he hugged her and said, "Hey there, warrior princess." For the first time in her life the nickname bothered her, enough that he asked what was wrong.

She almost told him. She had always been able to share everything with him; everything except for her occasional, uncomfortable communications with her mother. Only now, she wasn't sure what scared her more: that Dad would think she had gone insane, or - or that he wouldn't. So she said that nothing was wrong; and then they sat together over iced tea and sandwiches and she gave him the censored version of what happened on the dig. They talked about his favorite students and the school history club, and her Xena seminar (she managed not to show how much she wanted to change the subject) and his recent trip to Montreal; they played chess (she won two out of three rounds), and he proudly showed her his latest find, the 1926 radio he was rebuilding in the basement. Late that night on the train to New York, Lynn stared into the dark window where yellow lights flickered by and where her own reflection was a faded gray ghost. The thought that she had lied to her father made her feel empty and a bit dirty.

She went back to work. She repeated the socially acceptable version of her trip to her colleagues at a faculty lunch hastily gathered by the department chair. When a _Newsweek_ reporter called, she considered declining, except that declining would have meant admitting to herself that everything was falling apart. She made herself listen to Matt, her clean-cut, inhumanly efficient teaching assistant, as he briefed her on the Xena seminar. (Carrie was writing her paper on _Xena!_ the musical after all, supposedly analyzing its treatment of the historical record.) She considered going against all her principles and letting Matt grade the papers.

And all this time, there were still the dreams, and the even more troubling memories that came to Lynn when she was wide awake.

There was no sign of Ares; nothing at all, except in her dreams. Once, as she sat in her office looking over the course materials, she thought she felt his presence. She sat still, her skin burning, her heart thumping loudly and painfully. Then, there was nothing. The worst of it was that a part of her wanted him to be there. Or maybe the worst was that she didn't know what she wanted anymore - just like, when the phone rang the morning after she got back and Lynn saw Jackie's number on the caller ID, she stood still in her kitchen and watched the phone ring. She forced herself not to call back that day; and then, the next day, she had to force herself to call. She told Jackie that she would be very busy the next few days. "Everything's fine," she lied.

When Lynn finally decided to see a psychiatrist, she looked for one out of town. A physician search website led her to a Dr. Constance Bergman, who had a practice in Hoboken; as if a twenty-minute ride across the river on the suburban train would somehow put enough distance between this and real life. As it happened, the doctor had an opening the very next day due to a cancellation, which was good because it didn't leave much time for Lynn to ponder canceling her own appointment. Even so, several times during her ten-minute walk from the train station to Dr. Bergman's office, she thought about turning back.

When she was almost there, it started to rain; by the time she was inside, her skirt and blouse were wet and her hair was clinging damply to her neck. The doctor's waiting room, empty except for a nervous, haggard middle-aged woman in thick glasses and with a heap of frizzy graying hair, was filled with the uncomfortable chill of air conditioning and with a too-bright light that made it look like a movie set. As Lynn sat filling out her first-time patient forms, she felt restless and out of place and vaguely ridiculous.

When she was done, there was nothing to do but wait and read magazines (she hadn't brought a book). The latest _Newsweek_ had a cover story on the Hollywood diva Venus Madison, all glittering blonde curls and dimpled smile, and her new movie, _Space Pirates in Love_. As Lynn leafed distractedly through the magazine, her eye fell on a reproduction of a Xena portrait from a Roman fresco, and a small photo of herself from a couple of years ago. _Life and Death of a Warrior Princess,_ said the headline. That was the article for which she'd been interviewed; she skimmed it and found the quote. _"This is without a doubt the most exciting archeological find of the last 50 years, if not more," says New York University historian Lynn Doyle, author of a forthcoming biography of Xena, who flew to Greece as soon as she got news of the discovery. While Doyle won't provide specifics, she asserts that the scrolls and the other artifacts found in the temple will not only "revolutionize our knowledge of Xena's life and death" but "greatly enrich our understanding of the ancient world" as well. While the experts have yet to render their judgment, Doyle is convinced that the scrolls are authentic and that the chakram is the real thing._

Lynn was about to close the magazine when something else caught her eye: _a tall man in black… blue light…_ Her face felt very hot; for a moment the letters on the page danced senselessly before her eyes. Somehow, finally, she managed to read.

 _History aside, the discovery seems to have given rise to ghost stories as well. Workmen swear that on a few occasions, they have seen a tall man in black lurking in the temple's lower chamber - a man who, they claim, looked much like the painting of Ares on two of the murals, and who disappeared in a blinding flash of blue light as soon as they came in. The archeologists had no comment on the tale of the haunted temple, but it will no doubt enhance the site's potential as a tourist attraction._

She re-read this, and read it again a third time, and every time it said the same thing. A sullen girl in a flower-print dress came out of the doctor's office; the woman in the waiting room scrambled to her feet, and they went up to the front desk to talk quietly to the receptionist. Lynn, feverish and shivering, barely noticed. It was all she could do to force her hand to stay steady as she put the magazine back on the table. Someone else had seen him; this time it couldn't be written off as a dream or a collective hallucination. For a moment she thought she could feel his presence again, a flash that lasted only a moment and left her dizzy and drenched in sweat.

By the time she went inside the doctor's office, she had calmed down. She had also decided - though she didn't fully realize this until the door shut behind her - that she would say nothing about hallucinations, about her encounters with Ares, or about those unbearably vivid daytime memories of things that had never, _never_ happened to her. She would only talk about the dreams, the nightmares, and ask if there was a way to make them stop.

The next twenty minutes with Dr. Bergman dragged on forever. Lynn assured the doctor - a gaunt, strangely colorless woman of indeterminate age, with a clipped, vaguely European accent - that there was no history of psychiatric disorders in her family, and politely rebuffed attempts to pry into personal things like her relationships with men and the trauma of her parents' divorce. Finally, she walked out of that joyless office with a prescription and a follow-up appointment that she suspected, in the back of her mind, she wouldn't keep.

Back home, she sat for a long time at her desk, not turning the light on even when the dusk began to deepen, and stared at the bright orange bottle with the pills. The phone rang; she didn't have to look at the caller ID to know it was Jackie. She didn't answer.

She took the pills. That night, there were no dreams, nothing at all. She woke up with a heavy, empty feeling, as if she had spent the night in some thick gray void, knowing that beyond that void were terrible, wonderful things waiting to be seen, heard, remembered.

That day Lynn went to her office to grade the papers, and found that she couldn't do it. What a joke, all these good little girls and boys dutifully thinking exactly as she'd taught them: that the gods and demons of Xena's story were just figments of Gabrielle's bardic fantasy. One paper, oh-so-cleverly titled, "Xena's Ares: Patron God or Demon Lover?", examined depictions of Xena's relationship with Ares in literature and art; somewhere near the beginning was the matter-of-fact statement that Xena's romance with Ares had been undoubtedly invented by Gabrielle both as a status enhancer and as a way to cover up her friend's potentially compromising relationship with some human warlord, or maybe a priest of the Ares cult.

Lynn pushed the paper aside and closed her eyes, her forehead resting on her palm. Out of nowhere, came the quaint thought that if Jackie had been in her class, maybe she would have spoken up for gods and demons and other strange things. Suddenly, the need to talk to Jackie was so intense that when Lynn dialed her number, she was almost praying that Jackie would answer, and got her voice mail of course. She left a message that she hoped didn't sound too desperate - _please let's get together soon, we have to talk_ \- and went out into the hallway to get coffee, forcing herself to stay aware when people said hello. Back in her office, she leafed through the papers. It was the usual mix: a Freudian-tinged examination of whether Livia was really Xena's daughter, an exploration of Xena and Gabrielle's role in the transition from the old religions to monotheism, a Marxist analysis of Xena as a hero of the lower classes.

It was too much. She called Matt; he was available, and happy to help.

When she got home, she sat and stared at the bottle of pills again. She had no idea if she would ever see Ares again - didn't want to think about it, right now - but she knew one thing: she wanted her dreams back. She knew she shouldn't; she also knew that she had wanted them this whole time, even as she hated them and fought them. After a while she got up abruptly, went to the bathroom and emptied the bottle into the toilet, and watched as the blue and red swirl disappeared. She didn't know which feeling was stronger: fear or relief.

And just then, the phone rang, and a babbling, blubbering Artie told her that Jackie had been hit by a car and was in the hospital, near death.

X X X

"I, I - " Artie bolted up from the chair, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, cast a wild look around and made as if to go somewhere, then sighed loudly and sat down again. "It was all my fault."

He had already explained it five or six times; he had waved to Jackie from across the street by their apartment building, and she had waved back at him, and he'd yelled that there was a package for her from the post office, and she couldn't hear him and started crossing the street, and -

Lynn shuddered and lowered her eyes. She saw her own hands clutching an empty Styrofoam coffee cup, crushing it in her fingers.

They sat in the waiting area of the emergency room at St. Luke's Hospital - a clean and well-lit hell, a place of misery and fear; a place of hope, too, only not for her. Two teenage girls in soccer uniforms, gangly and fresh-faced, were standing by the wall nearby, crying quietly and hugging; their teammate, Lynn had gathered from snatches of conversation she had distractedly picked up, had been brought in with a broken leg - _only a broken leg … and Jackie was dying._

 _Jackie, dying._ Jackie had called her and she hadn't picked up: That moment replayed itself again and again in her head, the hopeless ringing of the phone, the bottle of pills in her hand, the darkening room, the phone ringing, again and again until she couldn't breathe. Maybe if she had answered then, they would have been meeting for lunch today - maybe this wouldn't have happened, maybe Jackie would still be all right. Her mind was racing, a jumble of memories and regrets and things that she should have said to Jackie, things tumbling through her head too fast to make any sense of them. If only she had picked up the phone… The last time they actually spoke, she had pushed Jackie away, frozen her out - pushed her away with a "Look, I'm going to be really busy the next few days" and a promise to call … and now, Jackie was never even going to hear her message, not even that -

"Oh my God." Next to her, Artie sniffled. "You have no idea - her head - there was all that blood, oh God - "

Choking back a sob, Lynn leaned back and closed her eyes. The darkness dissolved into a bright flash, and then she saw blood; blood on the grimy wooden floor, blood on her hands, on the horrible bright blade on the chakram - Gabrielle's blond hair, slick and heavy with blood… and then she was outside, in the mud and rain, clinging to a last hope - _Gabrielle, you're the purest thing in my life -_

"And her arm - " Artie's shaking voice broke into the nightmare and snapped her back to another one - "her arm was all twisted and - oh God, her face… "

"Artie!" Her own voice, hoarse and bitter, startled her. "Stop it."

"Sorry." He fidgeted and took off his glasses again, twirling them in his hands. "Did they, uh - did they call her – her family?"

"They said they would."

 _You're my best friend, my family…_ She had a vague memory of Gabrielle lying on a pallet somewhere, her face a ghastly color, weak and bathed in sweat, dying. _Dying._

"You know - if they'd at least let us see her or - "

"She's in intensive care." Lynn crunched what was left of the cup in her hand. "They're not letting anyone see her."

"Oh God - " Artie's voice rose - "maybe she's already dead - "

" _No_." Lynn whipped around with a ferocity that seemed to come from somewhere else, wanting to grab him, shake him. "Stop that. She's not dead."

He nodded, whined something inarticulate and stared down, wiping his glasses on his plaid shirt. As they sat next to each other in a tense silence, a few people stared at them, including the heavyset, thin-lipped nurse at the desk. Lynn's outburst, far from releasing her tension, had left her angry and restless. There was nothing worse than knowing you couldn't do anything; nothing worse.

"Mr. Kimmelman?" said a velvety, slightly accented female voice. Artie jerked spasmodically and looked up. The woman standing in front of them, with beautiful chiseled features, tawny skin and soft eyes, wore a white coat and a name tag that said, "Dr. Krishna." There was an odd discomfort in her look; not sympathy or solemnity, or the awkwardness of a bearer of bad news, but almost a kind of puzzlement.

"Please come with me." Before Lynn could say anything, the doctor turned to her. "Are you Ms. Doyle? Lynn Doyle?"

Lynn's heart was racing wildly. For a moment she felt such fear as she had never felt before; and yet now, somehow, there was hope.

"Yes," she said.

"Ah, very good. Both of you - please come with me."

Artie scrambled to his feet, almost dropping his glasses, and they followed Dr. Krishna through the doors marked _Authorized Personnel Only_ , inside a room where the peculiar hospital smell of drugs and illness saturated the air and there were many cubicles partitioned off with curtains, past the nurse's station and through another pair of doors, and finally into a sterile-looking hallway. The doctor stopped and turned toward them, again with that strange look in her face, as if she didn't quite know what to say.

"Your friend, Ms. Lyons," she said. "I - I have some good news."

Artie struggled for breath. "She's - going to make it?"

"Oh yes. She's - " Dr. Krishna paused, as if trying to choose her words carefully. "She is, in fact - completely well."

Lynn felt nothing at first; the words fell into some dreamlike void and disappeared into it. She saw, as if from afar, the comically stupefied look on Artie's face. _Completely well._ The emotions hit her all at once, and she wanted to laugh, to cry, even to hug Artie.

"W-what do you mean?" Artie choked out.

"The thing is, Mr. Kimmelman," said the doctor, "we don't quite - understand it ourselves … yet. As your friend was being brought into the intensive care unit, she regained consciousness. When she was examined, she - well, she didn't seem to have any injuries at all."

Artie blinked and shook his head. "What are you talking about? I was there, I - and the guy in the ambulance - he said - " He threw up his hands and trailed off.

Lynn was finally able to speak - slowly, measuring each word, afraid that if she let go her voice would betray her.

"You mean - there's been some mistake. She was never injured?"

"We're not quite sure, Ms. Doyle. The paramedics who were first on the scene did say that she had severe head trauma, as well as a broken arm. There is blood on her hair and her clothes. But we couldn't find actual injuries anywhere."

There was a strange sound from Artie, something between a laugh and a sob. "You mean - it was like … some kind of miraculous healing?"

Lynn felt so faint that for a moment she thought she was tottering and would have to lean against the wall; but no, she was steady on her feet. Again, a memory from that other place came into her mind: _You healed them without my blessing… - I gave up my immortality to save them._ There was a sudden dryness in her mouth. _Miraculous healing…_

" - on the assumption that the paramedics were mistaken," the doctor was saying. "Of course, we still want to run some tests before we release her. To say that this is highly unusual would be an understatement."

"Is she -" Lynn fought a spasm in her throat - "is she - conscious now?"

"Yes, of course. She wanted to see you, as a matter of fact."

"Oh," Lynn said quietly. Her eyes felt strange - heavy - as if she were about to cry. "She - said that?"

"Yes." Dr. Krishna smiled slightly. "Please, come with me. This way. But do try not get her too excited."

As they started down the corridor, Artie lingered behind them, still stunned, his features working frantically. The doctor turned to look at him and said, "Mr. Kimmelman?" and he bolted and scrambled after them, trying to ask a dozen questions at once and tripping over his own words.

"Mr. Kimmelman," the doctor said. "Please. I told you - we really don't know anything ourselves yet." Then, as they walked on, she turned to Lynn and asked, "By the way, does Ms. Lyons know someone named Xena?"

Lynn's couldn't breathe, and her own voice sounded strange to her as she said stiffly, "Why?"

"It was the first thing she said when she came to."

As Lynn searched for words, Artie unwittingly came to the rescue.

"It's about that book, isn't it?" he said with a nervous laugh, nodding toward Lynn. "They're writing a book about Xena - you know, the warrior princess - the Greek hero - actually they just got back from some dig in Greece, and well, you know - she's been pretty preoccupied with that - "

"That's right," Lynn said. "That must have been it."

The doctor gave her an amused look. "She must be quite dedicated to her work. Oh well, it's not very important. We just wondered if perhaps it was - someone close."

X X X

When Dr. Krishna showed them inside the hospital room, Jackie was sitting on the edge of the bed, in a light blue hospital gown that seemed too big for her, her light brown hair falling down loosely on her shoulders. She raised her head from the magazine she'd been reading - that same _Newsweek_ with Venus Madison on the cover. She looked pale in the room's yellowish lighting, and her eyes seemed huge and flecked with green.

She smiled a little and said, "Hey," and suddenly Lynn was fighting tears, and then no longer fighting. Everything before her eyes momentarily dissolved into sparkles as she didn't walk but rushed toward Jackie. She grabbed Jackie's hand and squeezed it, and on some impulse pressed it quickly to her face.

"You're all right," she said hoarsely.

Jackie looked at her, startled and moved, her lips parted slightly in surprise, and then reached out and hugged her, her body warm and slender in Lynn's arms.

When they pulled apart, Lynn became aware that Artie was staring at them, and that she was still clutching Jackie's hand. She felt stiff and clumsy. Get a grip, she told herself; Jackie was a friend, but they'd only known each other for about two months, and -

 _She's the only friend._

Something changed then. Lynn knew that this had happened before, many times: almost losing Gabrielle and finding her again. She could see it so clearly now, not as visions that came from somewhere else but as memories truly her own. There was a forest clearing, and she'd drawn her sword on Gabrielle thinking it was Hope - thinking Gabrielle was dead - and then she knew and hugged Gabrielle desperately, her heart swelling with joy and with anguish at the fear and hurt in her friend's face. There was a temple filled with bleeding, broken people, and Gabrielle was wounded and dying; she shouted in grief and banged her fists on the girl's chest, refusing to give up - and Gabrielle gasped and moved, her eyes flying open. There was the great hall on Olympus -

"Gabrielle," she said softly. There was no fighting it, from now on - no point in even trying. She didn't want to fight it, not anymore.

Jackie's eyes widened a little, and Lynn heard the catch in her breath. Then a smile touched her face, and she whispered, "Xena."

Nothing else needed to be said; not right now. They looked at each other, and Gabrielle's fingers closed around Xena's and pressed lightly before she pulled her hand away.

Artie, standing at the foot of the bed, cleared his throat loudly and stammered, "Oh - hi, J-Jackie."

Jackie turned and smiled at him. "Artie!"

He scrunched up his face and squinted at her as she slid off the bed and came toward him. "I'm - I'm really sorry…"

"About what?"

"Well, it just - it all happened because I was trying to get your attention and all … It's - " He shook his head, his voice choked off by emotion. "I thought you were, you know - "

Jackie reached up and kissed him sweetly on the cheek, and poor Artie didn't know which way to look or what to do with his hands. Embarrassed, Lynn looked away. Something about this seemed _so_ familiar -

"Thank you for helping me out," said Jackie. "Did I really look that bad?" She turned to glance back at Lynn. "Come on - I must have just bumped my head and passed out."

"Umm…" Artie blinked and stared at her. "You, um - you looked _really_ bad."

Jackie frowned slightly and shrugged, mechanically smoothing her gown. "I don't get it. The doctors are acting like I came back from the dead or something…"

Artie shuffled his feet and gave a tense giggle. "You ever see this movie with Meryl Streep? Where she breaks her neck and, and – she dies, only she comes back to life because she drank this potion – you know, like an elixir of immortality - and they bring her to the hospital and the doctor totally freaks out - "

 _Immortality._ Something inside Lynn stirred at the word, a small jolt that turned to an unaccountable rush of excitement, or fear -

"Ha-ha," Jackie said. "Elixir of immortality. Right. That's me." She brushed her hair away from her face, wandered back to the bed and plopped down on it. "Look, guys, you've got to tell them to let me out of here. They want to do some more tests and stuff, but really, I'm fine. There's no reason for me to be stuck here."

Lynn stared at her, still struggling to hold that strange agitation in check. "Are you sure?"

Their eyes met, and Jackie grinned a little, wrinkling her nose. " _Completely_ sure," she said; and, of course, she was not just talking about being well.

"All right," Xena said. "Let's get you out of here."


	3. THE JOINING, Part 3: Reunion Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> x x x

x x x

On Saturday, Gabrielle persuaded Xena to celebrate their reunion with an outing to Central Park. It was a sunny day cooled by a summery breeze. As they walked down the path eating ice cream, navigating past parents with children, young couples, boisterous teenagers, and stylish elderly ladies with little dogs, Gabrielle found herself thinking that her friend had changed. There was something different about the way she carried herself, as if being fully aware of her life as the Warrior Princess had given her a new awareness of her body as well. In her faded gray jeans and sleeveless dark green top, Lynn looked both casual and striking, completely relaxed and charged with strength.

"Let's sit," Gabrielle said, pointing to a spot on the lawn not far from a young couple with a toddler and a slightly older boy. They went over and sat down on the bristly warm grass, stretching out their legs and kicking off their sandals. The wind made ripples in the sparkling silky green of the trees, caressed her bare arms, gently stirred her dress. It was a good day to be alive.

Except that, two days ago, she was supposed to be dead; and she still had no idea what had happened. She didn't want to think about it; not now.

After a brief silence she asked, "If you had a choice, to live now or go back to that time, what do you think you'd choose?"

Xena gave her a thoughtful look. "What about you?"

"Well, there was more adventure, wasn't there..." She trailed off. She had a feeling that, somehow, her question had struck a painful chord in Xena. Maybe it was because Lynn's - Xena's - memories of that life were still, two thousand years later, tainted with guilt. To Lynn Doyle, Xena had been a hero; to Xena, she would always be a criminal. For a moment, Gabrielle's thoughts drifted to her own new memories: She had killed, not once but many times. Maybe there was a good reason normal people didn't remember past lives. It was a past that wasn't truly her own, Gabrielle reminded herself; a different time, a different world. She would move on; but could Xena ever do that?

"On the other hand, we have much better sanitation," she said, trying to lighten the mood. "And cars. Much better than horses. Cars don't have a mind of their own."

"You should have tried driving my first car."

"And ice cream." Gabrielle swallowed the last of her cone and licked her fingers. "And computers. It's a lot easier to write."

"You did a pretty good job with parchment and quills."

"Thanks. And air travel. Did I tell you I spent two weeks in Australia the summer before I graduated? They have these wildlife parks where you can pet kangaroos and koalas and things… It's kind of sad, you know? To live your _whole_ life and never even know there _is_ such a thing as a kangaroo."

Xena raised an eyebrow. "Tragic."

Gabrielle chuckled and nudged Xena's bare foot with hers.

"And we have movies. And refrigeration. And, and – Band-Aids. Much better than making a poultice."

Xena gave her a mock glare. "Hey, don't knock my many skills."

They both laughed; and then the silence between them filled with the din of the crowd, the laughter and squeals of children, the barking of dogs, the chirping of birds, the snatches of music that mingled with the voices. _This time everything will turn out all right,_ Gabrielle thought. She touched Xena's arm.

"We found each other."

Xena turned to her, a tender, anxious look in her eyes. "And I almost lost you," she said in a near-whisper.

The silence now had an edge of tension, and Gabrielle could no longer hold back. "What do you think happened to me?"

"You know what the doctors think," Xena said guardedly.

"I know. But does it make any sense to you? I mean, you heard what Artie said…"

"Yeah," Xena said evenly. "I called him last night. Poor guy, he thinks he's going nuts and hallucinated the whole thing. Except – I know he didn't." She paused and added, "You know, there's something about him - "

Gabrielle glanced at her, surprised. "Artie? What? He's a really sweet guy."

Xena shook her head. "Never mind. I – I'm not sure."

"Anyway, look – it's not just Artie. I talked to the paramedic who was with me in the ambulance. She said my vital signs were barely there - she was sure I was going to die. And then it turns out I have no injuries at all? And it was all a mistake? Is that what you think?"

"Well, what am I _supposed_ to think?"

"Xena." Gabrielle gasped and sat up straight. "What if it was - him?"

Xena met her eyes with a hard stare. "Ares."

"Well, who else? I bet he's watching you, right?" Xena's expression didn't change. _By the gods, Xena, you can be so frustrating._ "Maybe he wanted to save me for you. Again."

Xena pondered this, her features softening a little. "But he can't. Remember? With Athena's death, the gods lost the power to heal."

"Oh. Well … maybe he got it back somehow?"

"Maybe," Xena said curtly.

Just then, it struck Gabrielle how surreal this was: the two of them here in Central Park in 2005 - Lynn and Jackie, Xena and Gabrielle - talking matter-of-factly about the Olympian gods, about things they had lived through nearly two thousand years ago. They stared at each other silently until a curly-headed blond girl of about seven, racing from or after something, slammed into Xena with a peal of breathless laughter. Gabrielle gasped in shock and a man shouted, "Watch where you're going, Ashley!"

The girl ran off and they were quiet again, until Gabrielle blurted out, "Have you seen him?"

"Not since Greece."

"He'll show up," Gabrielle said confidently. She realized that she was hoping Ares would be back. In the other time, she had at best grudgingly accepted Ares' place in Xena's life. But now… now, Ares was the only person around who shared her and Lynn's - her and Xena's - memories of a world long gone; much as, she suddenly realized, after their twenty-five year sleep in their other lifetime, he was one of their few links to the world they'd left behind. He and Aphrodite... After two thousand years, Ares' love had awakened Xena, the _real_ Xena, as much as she had awakened him. No way he'd give up on her now.

"Are you going to say anything to your dad?" she asked.

Xena gave her a startled look. "My dad… I'm going to see him tonight. I – I don't even know where to begin."

"Would he think you'd gone insane?"

"Actually - I'm not sure he would."

"Lucky you. _My_ parents would probably try to have me committed."

She tried to imagine telling her parents - New England college professors, he of economics and she of literature, whose attitude toward any notions of things supernatural was one of bemused irony - that she had been Gabrielle, Bard of Potadeia, in a previous life. Thankfully, she had been able to reach them on their cell phone before they had picked up the voice mail message from the hospital; she had assured them that she was fine, and had managed to convince them, far better than she'd managed to convince herself, that the whole thing had been some kind of mix-up. She had mentioned nothing else.

Gabrielle sighed and leaned toward Xena, their shoulders brushing. She wanted to ask if Xena thought Aphrodite was still around; but then she didn't want to talk about the gods or about their past anymore.

"Hey," she said, "want to go to the zoo?"

Xena turned her head brusquely, snapping out of the thoughts that had swirled in her mind for the last few minutes: about Ares, about the enigma of Gabrielle's near-death and recovery. It was as if she had solved one puzzle only to find that it led to a labyrinth of others. But there was no point in dwelling on that.

"It's pathetic," Gabrielle said. "I've been in New York for a year and I still haven't been to the Central Park zoo. I want to see the polar bears. And the penguins."

"The penguin house smells."

"Aha - so you've been to the penguin house, Ms. Warrior Princess!"

"Hmm. I kind of like the polar bears, myself."

"You would."

Xena grinned and squeezed Gabrielle's arm. No matter what else happened, they were together again, and it felt good. "Just think. Back then, we lived our whole lives without ever seeing polar bears or penguins. How did we manage?"

"Well, we can make up for it now. Come on."

"Right. The zoo it is."

She rose and held out her hand to help Gabrielle up; and, together, they walked back to the path.

And then Xena froze for a moment, the breath almost knocked out of her; because straight ahead of them was a tall, muscular, dark-haired man in black leather pants and boots, and a black T-shirt.

But even before they caught up with him, she knew it was a false alarm.

x x x

They were on their way back from the zoo, and walking along Fifth Avenue, when a slender, earnest-looking girl with Asian features approached them holding a clipboard and a stack of leaflets and asked if they'd sign a petition in support of the people of Huandong. The huge letters at the top of the black-and-white leaflet said, "China's Forgotten War," and there were grainy photos of ravaged villages. Huandong, a remote mountainous province, had been one of the world's worst danger spots ever since the collapse of the communist regime in China had led to the country's breakup. U.N., Russian, and Coalition troops had pulled out of the region in 2002 after the grotesquely named Spring Festival Day Massacre, leaving it to the mercies of several rival warlords. Gabrielle had recently read an article about it in The _New Yorker_ , by a free-lance reporter who had managed to spend a month in Huandong. It was not a happy story.

As they walked on, Gabrielle said, "You know, this is the kind of stuff we used to fight against."

"What?"

"Warlords on a rampage - innocent people with no one to help them - "

Xena gave her a sharp look. "So, what do we do? Steal my chakram from Mario, get you a couple of sais - brush up on our kickboxing - and hop on a plane to China to take on a bunch of warlords with machine guns?"

"I don't know. We're still - the people we were."

"And what's that? Who are we?"

"Well…" Gabrielle thought about it for a moment. "I'm a bard. Kind of minus the 'battling' part. You … you're a warrior trapped in the body of a college professor."

"Oh, funny," Xena said. "Very funny." There was a touch of bitterness in her voice, and Gabrielle wished she hadn't brought up the subject.

"Let's go get something to eat," she said. "I'm starved."

They walked silently for a few moments. Glancing at Xena, Gabrielle noticed that she seemed far away. She put a hand on her arm. "Are you okay?"

Xena sighed. "Gabrielle … it's such a different world. Maybe the time of lone heroes has passed, just like … just like the time of the old gods."

"Well, Ares is still here."

"Yeah, he is."

"And that's a good thing… right?" Gabrielle teased.

"Well, maybe he can help us figure it all out," Xena said evenly, staring ahead.

Suddenly, Gabrielle wanted to laugh; she felt mischievous and young. She lightly punched her friend's arm. "Are you sure that's the only reason?"

Xena turned and fixed her with a mock glare; and Gabrielle grinned at her in response. "I see you still don't do girl talk."

x x x

On the train back to New York, Xena felt restless. The evening had passed and of course she had still told her father nothing. ("You look great," he had said, and added, "You know, you had me worried a couple of weeks ago"; and she had lied, "Just tired from the trip, I guess.") She tried to shut out the sounds around her, the snatches of conversation, the empty plastic soda bottle rattling around the floor.

Outside the window, the night was black; as the train rolled on, islands of bright lights shimmered into being and then fell back into the void, dotted with other, more distant lights at the horizon. Her face was reflected in the glass, and for a long moment Xena studied her own features – a face she had seen for so many years, without ever pausing to think of the vague resemblance to murals and statues of the Warrior Princess. She had never believed in fate; but maybe it _was_ fate that she and Gabrielle were reborn at the same time, had met and gone to Greece together, had freed Ares. And now she was back – and where was he? What if she had scared him off, back in Thessaloniki, and he had given up – on Lynn – on Xena? He wouldn't, not so easily, not now …

And just then, she felt it, and knew.

All the other sounds fell away. She leaned back and closed her eyes and allowed a tiny, catlike smile to curve in the corner of her mouth.

"I know you're there," she said, not caring who else would hear her or what they'd think. "I want to see you. Now."

Nothing happened at first, of course.

She opened her eyes and watched the doors of the car, the breath caught in her throat.

There was the sound of the vestibule door sliding open behind her at the other end of the car; and there were steps, coming closer. She thought she felt a hot breath brush her hair, making the warmth spread slowly to her neck, her arms –

The steps stopped and the leathery seat creaked and sagged slightly as he sat down next to her; and when she turned her head, there he was.

He was dressed in modern clothes, simple pants and a T-shirt, the familiar pendant a touch of silver on black; his expression a hint of a quizzical smile.

"Hello, Xena," he said.

When she could breathe again, she wasn't sure if she wanted to kiss him or to hit him - an old familiar feeling.

"About time you showed up."

He was silent for a moment. "I was waiting for you."

"I thought _I_ was waiting."

"You weren't quite yourself," he said quietly.

She thought of their encounter at the hotel, that moment when she pushed him away in mortal panic, terrified of herself more than of him. It must have hurt badly, when he had finally found her after all that time. Maybe he had been right to wait - to let her find herself first.

"And now?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "You're back. Don't you think I'd know that?" He reached out and took her hand, weaving his fingers around hers. "I see you found your little friend, too."

 _Little friend._ The words jolted Xena back to reality; she had to ask him. "You've been watching us all this time, haven't you?"

"Define 'all.' Not every minute of - "

She cut him off, impatient. "Gabrielle's accident. The way she recovered – more like came back from the dead. Did you have something to do with that?"

"I heard you talking about it. Nice of Blondie to give me credit, but – no. It wasn't me."

"So what was it?"

Ares gave her a thoughtful look, as if trying to figure something out. Then he shook his head. "Like you said - my healing powers are gone." His words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, and Xena half-expected him to say something else, but he didn't. He had no reason to lie to her, certainly not about this. That meant the puzzle of Gabrielle's recovery was still there, still nagging at her. But that could wait.

Xena moved her leg and her sneaker-clad foot pressed lightly against his boot. The sensation was a shock, as if it were her bare skin, alive and hot from his touch.

"I hope you bought a ticket," she said.

His mouth creased in amusement, the shade of wariness gone. "And if I didn't?"

"I'll have to turn you in to the conductor, then."

"Catching fare-beaters? Hardly a task worthy of the Warrior Princess."

"You should talk. The God of War, picking up girls on the local train."

" _One_ girl," he said.

x x x

As it turned out, Ares was able to produce a ticket, though Xena strongly suspected that it didn't come from the ticket machine. After the conductor shuffled on, he moved closer and wrapped an arm around Xena's shoulder, and eventually, without even noticing, she relaxed and leaned against him. She thought of a time when they sat like this on a gray rocky beach under a pale sky, and there were waves crashing in cascades of white foam, and a craggy cliff overhead.

Together, like any other couple, they got off the train and walked side by side, past the tired late-night commuters still ambling around Penn Station, out into a city barely cooled by the evening, into a night flooded with bright lights and dominated by green-and-gold spire of the Empire State building. It was there that Xena stopped abruptly and turned, and stared at Ares; and he was just as real as the city around them. He stood still, his eyes locked on hers - anxious, tender, questioning - his lips open slightly. Her heart was beating too fast, and there was a catch in her voice as she said, "Here we are… "

When they kissed, it was gentle at first, his tongue barely parting her lips; then they responded to each other's hunger, and his kiss became greedy, claiming her mouth, bruising her lips - making her want more, filling her with a heat that was much more than mere arousal. Eventually, they had to stop, and when they did they both laughed, breathless and happy. Later, there would be questions to ask, things to resolve. Now, there was only _them_.

She could have asked him to whisk her back to her place. Surely there was some empty street corner nearby where the sight of two people vanishing in a blue glare wouldn't scare the wits out of some New Yorker who thought he'd seen everything, like the wiry dark-skinned man hawking the late-night edition of _The New York Post_ who now eyed them with jaded amusement. She thought about it for a moment. But instead, she said, "Let's go."

They started down Seventh Avenue. The shops and even most of the restaurants were closed by now, and there were only a few people hurrying along and cars whooshing by; a lonely sidewalk musician with a saxophone, slouched by the floodlit lobby of a bank, was pouring out a heart-tugging jazz tune. She glanced at Ares and wondered what it was like to see the city as he did.

"What do you think?" she said softly.

He shrugged. "It's not what it used to be."

"What is?"

"You know." He glanced at her wryly. "The mortal world."

" _Really_. Chariots that run without horses - machines that fly - all this - " she swept her arm across the air, indicating the skyscrapers, the lights, the city itself - "and you're not impressed?"

"Well, that's exactly it. Where's the fun in being a god when any mortal with a gadget can do all that?"

His tone was mocking and nonchalant, but all the bravado couldn't quite disguise the fact that he wasn't joking. It struck Xena that he was far more lost here than she was, a stranger in a world where the ancient gods were nothing more than fairy-tales and tourist attractions. The joy she had felt was dulled by a quiet sadness. But no, she was not going to give in to that, not tonight. He had done this for her, he had found her - they had found each other - and the night was theirs.

She stopped and turned to face him, curving the corner of her mouth in a small smile. "Oh - I'm sure you'll get the hang of it."

Again they faced each other silently. Then, slowly, he brushed the back of his fingers over her cheek, her mouth, her jaw, as if he were a blind man trying to memorize her features, or perhaps to recognize them. Even back in the days when she knew she had to fight him, she could never quite resist that, the way his touch was so light and gentle on her face. She leaned forward and brought her mouth to his.

When she drew back, he looked at her with such dazed adoration that she wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or to cry, or to kiss him again.

"You know," she said, "if I'd known I was going to have a date..."

He grinned, regaining his composure. "Is _that_ was this is."

" - I would have worn something different."

"Leather?"

"No." She chuckled. "Not leather."

He studied her for a moment and put his hands on her shoulders. The warm air seemed to swirl around her, and when he took his hands away, something felt different. Xena looked down at herself. She was now wearing a slender long dress, red with a slash of black, with a silver buckle on the belt and a small scattering of silver sparkles on the bodice. She gaped at him, momentarily speechless.

"Something like _this_?" he asked.

"Where did you - "

He cleared his throat and jerked his head slightly toward the shop window next to them. There stood a mannequin wearing nothing but high-heeled strapless shoes and an onyx bracelet, and a rather insulted look on its vacant face.

"Ares." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Put it back."

"It looks good on you."

"It looked even better before it was stolen."

He sighed. "What have you got against fun?"

" _Put it back._ "

"Okay, okay" - he sighed and lazily drew a hand across the glass; a burst of blue smoke formed around the mannequin, and when it cleared the dress was back - or maybe an identical dress, because Xena was still wearing one too. She suddenly remembered how she had come to his temple in a red or maybe even pink dress, and with roses and (good God!) a teddy bear.

"Better?"

" _Much_ ," she said, smiling wickedly, advancing on him until his back was to the glass and there was no more than a hair's width between their bodies, a predicament he didn't seem to mind. "Much - " she seized his lips in a quick, teasing kiss - " _much_ " - and another kiss that made him gasp and press into her - "better."

His arms were around her now, his hand sliding down her back, his lips hot on her face and her neck; and then he whispered huskily into her ear, "You think we're going to be - some place private - anytime soon?"

"Oh - " She pulled back and opened her eyes. A young man in oversized pants and baseball cap turned backwards passed by and gave them a dirty look. Belatedly, Xena caught herself hoping that no one had been around to see all those tricks with the dress.

"Soon," she said. "Very soon."

x x x

After all this, back at her place, they did not rush things. Xena told Ares to wait for her in the main room, and he waited, his excitement a slow burn that felt almost like an odd kind of calm.

He looked around. The room, lit by a pair of bronze lamps - decorated, rather to his amusement, with bronze statuettes of Xena with Gabrielle and Argo - was hardly bigger than the main room of that farmhouse near Amphipolis, though admittedly it was in far better shape. His eyes wandered over the walls, bare except for a couple of small paintings of Greek and Roman ruins; the armchair with a pile of books and papers on it; the square desk, with more books and papers. An unruly leafy plant was perched on top of some bookshelves, and there was one of those television boxes that served as home theaters for people these days; and there was also a rather large couch.

Suddenly, he felt ridiculous - here in this apartment, in a city that did not exist when he had last walked the earth; in an apartment that looked inhabited not by Xena but by Lynn, the half-stranger he had met in Greece. _If he could have taken her to a temple instead…_ He walked over to the desk and saw a framed picture of a younger Xena - Lynn - with short hair and a slightly wistful smile, standing in front of some castle next to an older man. Her father, of course.

She was back. Ares turned around and saw that she was carrying a bottle and two glasses, not quite up to the gold- and gem-decked goblets from the old days. She poured out the wine, her fingers grazing his as she handed him a glass. They stood facing each other; and, by the Fates, she was Xena, real - alive - so beautiful nothing else mattered. The glasses clinked, and the deep red wine gleamed in the lamplight, and they drank, silently.

The wine had a tart taste, with a hint of sweetness. He thought of tasting it on her lips - tasting the soft skin of her neck, and trailing his mouth down to her naked breast -

"So," he said, his voice tight. "This is where you live."

Xena drank quickly and lowered her glass. "Yeah," she said. Her eyes looked strangely dark, her parted lips glistened softly, and it dimly occurred to Ares that if he had never seen her before he would have fallen in love with her right now, as she was.

Almost sharply, she reached for the bottle to refill her glass. His mouth was dry, and he took another sip of wine.

"Funny, to think of you living in one place. Especially a place like this."

"What, as opposed to a fortress?"

"Maybe. Or a farmhouse."

She chuckled in response. Then she asked, "Have you been here before?"

"No. I figured I'd - give you your space."

Her eyebrow arched slightly. "Space? Doesn't sound like the Ares I know."

"Gods can change, remember?" Tartarus - he was dying here, and she was bantering. He gulped down the rest of the wine and put the glass down on the desk. "I figured if I came here, it would be - "

"By engraved invitation?" She too put down her glass and came closer.

"Well - I don't know about engraved - "

Now she was so close that their breaths mingled, and he couldn't say another word, couldn't go on another moment without kissing her - couldn't move. He thought he saw a flash of fear in her eyes; and then it dissolved into pure desire and tenderness. Her hand clasped on the back of his neck, and he heard her whisper, "This is an invitation."

With that she kissed him.

He didn't know exactly how they ended up on the couch; only that they kissed for a long time, Xena lying on top of him, his hands moving over her body, sliding under her dress to caress her legs and hips - _sweet Fates_ \- he was still afraid to believe it was real. She pulled back and pushed up his shirt, and trailed her lips down his bare chest, sucking his nipple, teasing with her tongue and teeth until he bucked under her and clutched at her hair. She pushed the shirt higher, and he helped her along as she got it off him. It was real - after all the waiting, all the dreaming, it was real, and there was something terrifying about that, too. Once, they had known each other perfectly. Now -

"Come here," he said hoarsely. "Xena - "

He pulled her up into another frantic kiss, reaching for the back of her dress - no buttons, just one of those zipper things that opened all the way down - that was easy - she sat up to let him peel off the top and it fell loosely around her waist. The black breast-band underneath had some sort of tiny hooks in the back, and, _dammit_ \- he tugged at it, and tried again and was just about ready to give up and make it vanish - and just then she gave a gasping laugh and arched back to help him and the accursed thing fell away.

He had missed her so, all of her; the sight of her like this, strong and sensual in her supple grace, her nakedness so unashamed and somehow vulnerable - defenseless - just like her face was defenseless now as she looked down at him, as she guided his hands to her breasts. The sounds she made were low and soft and maddening, and he wanted more, wanted to make love to her with his mouth and to be inside her and see her eyes blur in delight. She swept down to seize his lips in a hungry kiss, and he slid his hand up her thigh and touched her through her thin undergarment - so warm, so wet, needing him as he needed her - now she was kissing his face and lips, quick hot tender kisses that left him breathless - her fingers tugged at the button on his pants, and again - more than god or mortal could take.

"Hey," he managed, "I could get rid of this - "

"Shh - " she stopped him by slipping her tongue in his mouth, her teeth grazing his lower lip; the button undone, she stroked and squeezed lightly through the rough fabric and he was lost to everything but her touch and her kiss - her hand fumbled at the zipper and he would have begged for mercy when she gave a frustrated huff - "Do it."

At his wish, their clothing melted away; now it was just skin on bare skin and her breasts on his chest and his cock pressed against her stomach, the heat of her melting into every fiber of his flesh, overwhelming his senses.

Regaining some control, he moved to flip her over on her back, but she stopped him, her palm flattened on his chest.

"Wait," she whispered, "wait."

He groaned, very near desperation - "Xena" - and she silenced him with another kiss, this one gentle and sweet and long; and then she guided him inside her and slid down, and the waiting was over. There was the first exquisite shock of it, and the lovemaking after that - looking into her eyes, wide and hazy with pleasure - knowing that no matter what might ever divide them, right now their union was complete - knowing that it was _her_ , not an almost-Xena who had been her in another life, but his love, his love -

He could feel the shudders in her body, her movements more frantic, her undoing near. "I love you," he said, his voice thick, his hands gripping her shoulders, "Xena - I love you - "

"Ares - " she leaned down to kiss him and he felt her moan vibrate in his throat; and then, moments later, she was crying out, the spasms inside her clenching around him until she took him with her into wave after wave of hot bliss.

Then he lay still, wonderfully drained, feeling the last of her little tremors, enveloped in her warmth. Xena raised her head and looked at him, her face transformed by tenderness.

"I love you," she said.

x x x

"What?"

Xena chuckled softly and sat down next to Ares, handing him a glass of wine. "Nothing," she said. She couldn't really tell him that she was smiling because, looking at him sprawled on her couch like that, she had thought of the phrase, "beautiful as a Greek god." He was naked and relaxed, his arm hanging lazily off the couch, the pose of complete rest somehow only bringing out the power of his form. He was perfect, and something about that made her feel a sudden twinge of sadness. She pushed it away and took a slow sip of wine.

He lifted his arm and touched a strand of her hair, running it through his fingers. She took his hand and pressed it to her face, closing her eyes to bask in his touch, and then brought her mouth to his palm. It pleased her to hear his gratified sigh.

It occurred to her that she - Lynn - the woman she had been her whole life - should have felt awed or shocked at the thought that she had just made love to the God of War. Or maybe crazy. Or reckless, considering that in _this_ life she was only seeing him for the second time ever; the third if you counted the tomb. But there was none of that; only the quiet knowledge that everything was as it should be.

Well, not everything. She was hungry, for instance; and the thought of leftover pasta or slightly stale bread and cheese was singularly unappealing right now.

"I'll be right back," she said.

In the kitchen, there were some slightly withered yellowish grapes in the fruit bowl. They'd have to do.

When she returned to the living room with the grapes, Ares gave her an amused look. "What's that?"

She sat down next to him and put the plate down on the coffee-table. "Grapes," she said, a little defensively, as if she was going to stand up for the honor of supermarket fruit.

"Grapes," he repeated; and then, at the casual motion of his hand, the tabletop was buried under a heap of grapes, green with a blush of gold, fresh and bursting with ripeness. Even that didn't come as much of a shock. Ares looked at her, a wry smile twinkling at the corner of his mouth.

"There," he said. " _Those_ are grapes."

"Hah." She took a grape and slipped it in her mouth, savoring its taste. "I _could_ always order pizza, you know - "

"Don't look at me," he said placidly. "I don't do that stuff."

She smirked, picking another grape off its stem; and then she found herself thinking of the fortress where they used to spend their nights together, and of moon-glazed rocks by the sea. But that was long past.

She picked up the remote control and turned on the television.

" - fighting has resumed after a three-day truce - " said the blonde anchorwoman, and Xena felt a vague unease nudging inside her - "after rockets fired by Eritrean forces killed twenty-five people in the Ethiopian village of Kuchu. Please be advised that this report contains graphic footage that may be distressing to some viewers."

Tensely, Xena glanced at Ares. She remembered it too well - how, waking up in bed with him once, she saw him watching a battle in a portal - the flare of torches in the night, the gleam of metal, the dark glitter of blood, the cacophony of horses' neighs and human screams and clashing swords - and that awful look of pleasure on his face as he looked on - until the sight of a wounded man in mortal agony sickened him, changed as he was by his own time as a mortal. Now, his eyes were half-lidded and she could see nothing in his face. Somewhere, a part of her was afraid, again.

The CNN reporter in Kuchu was saying something about the attack while people scurried back and forth behind her. There was a shot of bodies on the ground, and blood - and an Ethiopian soldier in khakis, with a machine gun slung across her muscular shoulder and blood on her face, gestured angrily and spoke in agitated broken English.

And then the screen switched to, of all things, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whirling around a dance floor in sparkling black and white, to the gorgeous music of "Cheek to Cheek" - _and I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we're out together -_

Startled, she sat up, and then saw Ares' hand on the edge of the couch, his finger twitching, and realized that he had changed the channel.

"I didn't know you liked musicals," she muttered.

He gave her a mocking look. "Right."

She took a deep breath. "Back there - " She gestured toward the screen where, at the moment, Fred was dipping Ginger. "Did it - "

"Xena." He sat up next to her and put his arm around her, and as always she shivered at his touch. "These aren't _my_ wars."

 _Dance with me_ _-_

She tossed her head. "You feel - nothing."

 _I want my arms about you -_

"They're not even my _kind_ of wars," he said emphatically. "Funny thing…" He was touching her hair. "The rule of the old gods fell and - the love and peace thing didn't really work out, did it."

"People have free will. At least they're not being manipulated by - some god with an oversized ego." She said it with just enough of a playful touch; but it still brought back echoes of the time when, even as her lover, he was always her adversary, the God of War. Then she felt a tug of guilt: he had done all this so they could be together - and now, they were - and here she was, giving him a hard time over something she'd made her peace with a long time ago. Two thousand years.

 _And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak -_

She squeezed his hand, lightly stroking his palm with her fingertips, and he chuckled and kissed her shoulder.

"No - usually just by some mortal with an oversized ego. Big improvement."

 _When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek…_

And now there was only the melody pouring out, beautiful and too sweet and heartbreaking. She grabbed the remote and changed the channel again.

" - _really_ big story of the day," said a bright-eyed redhead in the studio of some late-night entertainment show, and the screen filled with an image of the blonde, curly, beaming Venus Madison - "is Venus pregnant?"

For some reason Ares reacted to this with uncontrollable mirth. Xena gave him a startled look while the peppy voice went on, "Our favorite screen goddess, who's been having a whirlwind romance with hunky co-star Tom Reese, has been keeping to herself for over a week - "

And, in a flash, it was so obvious that she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it before.

"Aphrodite."

"Yep," he said, and Xena found herself laughing with him. Aphrodite as a Hollywood diva … well, it actually made sense. It was about as close to being worshiped as the Goddess of Love as one could get these days.

"I guess that means she's not pregnant."

"My sister? I wouldn't put anything past her."

"Does she know you're - "

"Oh yeah " - he sighed dramatically - "nothing like family reunions. I thought I'd never get away long enough to see you."

She shook her head and grinned. It was good to know that Ares had found his sister here in this world, just as she was there once to keep him company on an Olympus left deserted by the Twilight; and, despite his flippancy, she knew he was glad too.

The television flickered out, and they sat together quietly. Those images from Ethiopia ( _may be distressing to some viewers_ …) forced themselves back into Xena's mind, and she thought of her conversation with Gabrielle in the park.

"Ares… do you think the time of lone heroes has passed?"

Ares turned and looked at her. She wasn't sure why she had asked him; there were things she couldn't expect him to understand. He touched her cheek lightly, his eyes searching her face.

"Don't," he said softly. "Not tonight."

He leaned closer and took her in his arms, drawing her toward him. She closed her eyes, and when his lips brushed against hers and then captured her mouth, she didn't want there to be anything else except the tender warmth of this kiss. The fever inside her rose again, and spread, making her arch toward him. She reached down to touch him but his hands locked gently on her arms, easing her down.

"Just - lie back," he said.

She sighed and closed her eyes, running her fingers through his thick soft hair as his kisses trailed down to her breasts.

x x x

She spent a fevered, half-remembered night; dozing off in his arms, in the bed where they had moved at some point, and waking up to make love again - basking in the touch of his hands and mouth and his body against hers - responding with her own caresses, and loving his shudders and the sounds he made; his whispered words hot on her skin. She slept and dreamt of him, wild dreams in which they faced each other as both enemies and lovers, in anger and in joy - their blades clashing in the Furies' temple, their fingers touching on a ravaged mountaintop as she looked into his bruised mortal face - his hands sliding up her thighs as she sat on his altar in a red dress - and then she woke up next to him and they reached for each other again, dream and reality dissolved in the dark colors of night.

Some time before dawn she must have fallen, finally, into a deep sleep; because when she woke up, lying on her stomach, there was day streaming in through the curtains, and she squinted at a sunspot on the beige wall and wondered for an instant if last night had been real - and then his hand lay on her back, flat and warm and heavy, and it was good.

Xena turned and looked at Ares. The sunlight glittered in the dark hair on his chest and lent his face a soft glow; or maybe it was the hint of a smile in his eyes, in the slight curve of his mouth. It came back to her, then, how much she'd always been moved by that look of quiet happiness in his face: because it was not a look one would expect to see in the face of a war god; and because she loved him. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, a short tender kiss that held the promise of more, and then pulled away to look at him.

"Good morning," she said.

He touched her face, a hint of mischief in that near-smile. "Sleep well?"

"Yeah," she said. "Not much. But well."

Ares chuckled and drew her back toward him, until her breasts were pushed up against his chest. "Come here."

As they lay still, looking at each other, she became aware of the aching protest of the muscles in her back, and realized that she could no longer ignore the other demands of her body.

"Hold that thought," she said.

In the bathroom, Xena looked at herself in the mirror. She could see the traces of his hard kisses on the skin of her neck, on her bright, puffy lips. She bent down to splash water on her face, and felt its fresh trickle on her chest. There seemed to be something different about the self that stared back at her from the mirror; her eyes seemed bluer, somehow, her hair darker, her features stronger than before. Or maybe she was just seeing herself with different eyes. She touched her fingertips to her reflection in the cool glass.

"Xena of Amphipolis," she whispered.

She came back to the bed and stood over Ares, smiling down at him. He lifted a hand and slowly traced a line up her thigh and her hip, and she shivered with pleasure, still wanting him -

And the phone rang, and rang again, its shrill sound startling and insistent.

"I could zap that thing," Ares said nonchalantly. "Or - you could ignore it."

"No," she said, flustered. "No, I - "

As she picked up, she heard Ares say, "Great. Now she can interrupt even when she's not around"; and, sure, enough, it was Gabrielle's voice at the other end.

"Xena?" Gabrielle sounded apologetic. "Am I, uh - interrupting?"

"Interrupting what?"

"Well, uh … I - I take it you're not alone."

"Wait … how did you - ?"

"No, I'm not psychic." Gabrielle laughed nervously. "You'll never believe who's here."

"Aphrodite," Xena said, much to her relief.

Ares shot her a look of mock disgust and rolled his eyes.

"She said Ares - well, she said you and Ares - "

"I don't think I want to know what she said."

"Well - she kind of wants to come over. Right now. Are you, um - is that okay with you?" After a brief pause Gabrielle continued, embarrassed, "Look, I'm sorry - it's just, you know, if I hadn't called - she was all set to - no, Aphrodite, wait - "

She trailed off, to be replaced by a familiar voice and silvery laugh. "Hey, Warrior Babe!"

"Hi, Aphrodite."

"Tell Ar to stop glowering. Noooo, I'm not watching you but I _know_ he's glowering, so tell him to cut it out. Look, I'm like _so_ happy for you crazy kids, okay? So don't tell me I can't come over and, like, _congratulate_ you in person. Come on, it'll be fun - just like old times - you know?"

"Give us … give me fifteen minutes," Xena said, resigned. "I was just about to take a shower."

Aphrodite giggled. "Sure you were. Okay, okay. I'll give you some room. Fifteen minutes."

The phone clicked off. Xena put it down and gave Ares an amused headshake. "Blame your sister."

"Oh, believe me - I do. But at least she didn't just show up sitting on the bed."

He rose and stood facing her, and they embraced again and wouldn't let go, breaking a kiss only to dive back for more, covering each other's faces and lips with hungry kisses that both answered their yearning and made it more acute.

"We'll have time," she whispered. "Later."

He gave her an odd look, then touched her cheek and nodded. "All right."

She wondered what he was thinking.

x x x

By the time Xena came out of the bedroom, presentable enough in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair still damp, Gabrielle, Aphrodite and Ares were already waiting in the living room. It all looked like a shockingly ordinary scene - except that Ares, sprawled casually in an armchair, was in his leathers and twirling a dagger, which caused Gabrielle to cast nervous glances in his direction. Aphrodite, perched on the couch next to Gabrielle, wore a spangled yellow-and-green monstrosity with a puffed skirt and a tiny top that probably cost more than all of Xena's possessions combined.

"Warrior Babe!" She rose to greet Xena with a perfume-drenched hug. "It's so good to _see_ you! Come here, sit with us - have some breakfast, brunch, whatever - "

She pulled Xena toward the couch and sat her down in the middle, and waved at the table which now displayed a steaming coffeepot along with an impressive array of pancakes, pastries and donuts.

"Good grief," Gabrielle said. "My cholesterol level is going through the roof just looking at this."

"Honey - " Aphrodite bit into a donut and giggled - "you can't _imagine_ how good it feels to be the only chick in Hollywood who doesn't have to worry about weight gain."

"Speaking of which," Ares said, "what's this about you being pregnant?"

"As if! Not that I mind the rumors, of course - nothing like a bit of mystery to help you in this business - "

"You have no idea what a scare she gave me," Gabrielle said, gingerly taking a pastry. "I mean - I come in and there's Venus Madison in my living room."

Aphrodite laughed, shaking her blonde curls. "What, you were expecting Brad Pitt?"

Ares adopted an air of conspicuous boredom and materialized a good old-fashioned goblet of wine in his hand, from which he sipped slowly, occasionally glancing at Xena.

"So," Xena said. "Hollywood. You found a way to be a love goddess after all."

"You bet. And hey, not for the first time, either! Come on, guess." She tilted her head playfully. "Nineteen-forties, fifties - "

Exasperated by their denseness, she huffed and shook herself slightly; the air around her seemed to shimmer softly, and then she was someone else – a subtly different face, different body, a different shape of blond curls. It was Gabrielle who gasped, "You were Laura Manderley?"

Aphrodite laughed, satisfied at last, and with the same quick shake and shimmer turned herself back into Venus Madison. Xena had never been much of a fan of 1940s and '50s movies, but it was impossible not to know Laura Manderley, the pop culture icon and sex symbol; a scene in the 1952 movie _Beauty on the Beach_ in which she emerged from the water with the top of her swimsuit half off was considered extremely daring for its time.

"So - you didn't actually die in that boating accident!" Gabrielle exclaimed.

"Well, d'uh!" Aphrodite rolled her eyes. "I mean - I totally couldn't have them wondering why the fabulous Miss Manderley wasn't growing any older, right? So what was I supposed to do, age gracefully and, like, play Cary Grant's mom? Eww - _gross_!" She laughed and reached for another pastry. "But - a movie star in her prime, lost at sea … ooh! The tragedy - the glamour… I am such a visionary!"

"My grandma said she cried for days when you died," Gabrielle said accusingly.

"Aw, honey - " Aphrodite patted her hand. "That's _sweet_."

"Honey, that's sweet" - Ares made a face. "Can't you two have your love-fest some place else?"

"Ar, come on. This is like a reunion. You and the Warrior Babe - me and my friend Gabby – you know, we go way, way back, don't we, Gabs?"

Way back… Watching them, Xena was truck by a sudden thought, so obvious that she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it until now. All along, she thought that Ares might have healed Gabrielle. But what if –

"Aphrodite," she said. Something in her voice made Ares turn and look, and actually stopped Aphrodite's chatter.

"Yes, babe?"

"Three days ago, Gabrielle was - in an accident. A bad accident." She spoke steadily, trying not to think of how it could have ended, would have ended, if not for - what? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gabrielle flinch. "And then she just - recovered. As if by divine intervention." She paused again. "Was it?"

"Honey, don't look at me!" Aphrodite laughed. "I couldn't have done it if I wanted to. I mean - not that I wouldn't have wanted to if I could, but - well, you know what I mean." And then to Gabrielle, "What happened? Don't tell me you got hit by a car or something!"

"Yeah," Gabrielle muttered. There followed an awkward silence. Gabrielle fidgeted, sighed, and poured more coffee into her cup, which jangled slightly on the saucer. Then she shifted her eyes to Xena and Aphrodite, her lips twitching as if she were working up the courage to say something.

"I-it's happened again," she said finally.

Xena froze, knowing, in spite of herself, exactly what Gabrielle meant. "What?"

"You got hit by a car _again_?" Ares asked genially and clucked his tongue in mock disapproval. Xena shot him a sharp look.

"Sweet pea," Aphrodite exclaimed, "you _gotta_ be more - "

"Look," Gabrielle said resolutely, getting up. She looked around, marched to the kitchen and came back a moment later with one of Xena's stainless-steel knives, and before anyone could say a word she slashed, wincing, at her index finger.

"Gabrielle!" Xena cried, leaping to her feet, and Aphrodite let out an "Owie!"; but Gabrielle held up her finger and said, "Watch." The crimson liquid swelled and began to drip ("Gross," Aphrodite complained), and Gabrielle picked up a napkin and wiped it off, exposing the whitish edges of the small wound; and then, the skin began to turn pink and whole, the cut healing before Xena's eyes as if it were nothing more than makeup erased by a wet cloth. She had seen this before, she realized: on the immortal Callisto.

"I cut myself in the kitchen last night," Gabrielle said. "And, well - then it was just - gone."

Ares stared at her intently, and then gave a slight nod as if he understood; and Xena whirled around on him, a sudden suspicion flashing through her mind.

" _You_." Her voice shook a little. "You made her immortal? Because you want _me_ to be im- "

Their eyes met and she broke off in mid-word.

"No," he said heavily.

"Whoa" - Aphrodite tossed her head - "major trust issues, bro," and Xena felt guilty.

"Guys?" Gabrielle said in a small voice. "Am I - am I - _immortal_? Immortal as in - eternal life?"

"Sure looks like it, sweet pea. What a trip, huh?"

"Aphrodite … wait." Gabrielle held up a hand, pleadingly. "This is all a little - disorienting. How could this just - happen?"

Ares studied her, thinking something over. "Back there in the crypt, when you two" - he cleared his throat - "woke me up. You didn't look around and take anything from a hiding place in the rock, did you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The crypt. Under the temple." He spoke as if explaining something to a small child. "The wall of the cave, by the entrance. You happen to take anything from there and - you know, pop it in your mouth?"

"Of course not!" Gabrielle said indignantly, as if Ares had accused her of filching a piece of candy. "Why - what was in there?"

"Ambrosia," Ares said matter-of-factly. "I put a stash there, just in case - " he trailed off.

"In case you needed a pick-me-up?" Aphrodite teased.

The realization hit Xena with a blast of hot desert air, and when that first moment passed she was dry-mouthed and soaked in sweat. She leaned on the bookshelves, almost knocking over the plant. _I could have stopped her._

"The water," she whispered. "I'm - I'm so sorry, Gabrielle."

The three of them stared at her in shock, and then Gabrielle managed a stifled, "The - water?"

"The water," she repeated dully, hearing her voice as if it came from somewhere else. "It must have gotten into the water. There was water dripping from the rock, next to the doorway - some kind of hidden source - spring… and you gathered a bit of it in your hand and drank. Remember?"

The look on Gabrielle's face told her that she did, and she was heartsick.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I should have stopped you…"

After a moment Gabrielle asked, "Do you think that's even possible? I mean, for the ambrosia to get into the water like that?"

"Well, what else could it be?"

"Okay," Gabrielle said mechanically. She walked over to the couch and sat down, her face blank. She picked her coffee cup and took a few slow sips, then put it back on the table. Xena walked over and sat next to her; but she didn't know what to say or to do.

"Come on, little one." Aphrodite beamed and squeezed Gabrielle's shoulders. "I know it's a shock at first, but once you - "

"Am I a god?" Gabrielle interrupted.

" _No!_ " Xena blurted out, taken aback by her own vehemence. Ares looked at her, and she couldn't tell if his expression was sympathetic or bitter.

"No," he said. "You're just immortal."

x x x

As the subway train hummed along, Gabrielle stared at the murky reflection of her face in the window, where the dark walls of the tunnel were streaked with lights. She tried to understand what she felt, and came up empty.

Aphrodite had offered to take her home before zapping off to Los Angeles to shoot a commercial for her new perfume, "Venus"; but she had refused, and had also declined Xena's offer to go home with her. There was something oddly comforting right now about riding the subway by herself, just one person among others in a half-empty train on a Saturday afternoon. One person among others; except that they would all die - the blue-haired old lady in an impeccably tailored suit, the teenagers in baggy pants yelling and laughing at the other end of the car, the balding potbellied man in the gray T-shirt, the brown-skinned, doe-eyed little girl in the frilly pink frock - and she wouldn't.

Her eyes fell on a copy of _The New York Times_ someone had left on the bench next to her. "Supermouse Heralds Longevity Breakthrough," said a front-page headline. Almost mechanically, she picked it up. A team of scientists had succeeded in breeding a mouse with a lifespan almost twice as long as normal. The supermouse, sitting on the hand of a smiling middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, was staring from the page with a befuddled look. _Twice as long as normal._ Gabrielle choked back a bitter laugh.

Deep down, she realized, she had never quite abandoned the childlike belief that she would live forever. Now, she had suddenly found out that she would, and her reaction was a numb disbelief. _Forever_.

Unbidden, the memory of her final moments from her other life flashed through her mind. She had gone East, hoping to find Eve and tell her of her mother's death; and, while traveling through Ch'in, had offered to help defend a village from a warlord. Maybe the truth was that a part of her had wanted to die; or, at least, that her will to live had weakened. She remembered a battle in the night – red lanterns that made the rainwater run like blood - the harsh face of a warrior with a thin, black, long mustache, and hair pulled tightly in the back of his head - the clanging of swords and the patter and splash of water - a long hard battle, and the wet chill of the night, and her own stinging cuts and aching muscles - and a part of her not caring anymore. There was a glistening blade slashing through the rain; and that was it. At least it was quick - a warrior's death, quick and in battle, and for a good cause. At least she did not see her body afterwards. She shivered and hunched her shoulders.

Two thousand years ago, Ares had offered Xena immortality at his side, and Xena had refused, knowing that if she accepted she would lose a part of her cherished humanity, a part of what made her herself. And now, Xena was still mortal but she - Gabrielle - Jackie Lyons - had had immortality thrust upon her, without a chance to choose. It hit her suddenly that Xena would grow old and die, and she would have to spend eternity without her; or maybe, like Ares, resign herself to searching for Xena reborn into another body, another person. The stab of pain at this thought jolted her out of her half-stupor. She sat up straight and shook her head, as if she could just toss away the knowledge of what had happened. _An eternity without her. Unless, of course, Xena -_

To distract herself, she picked up the paper again, skimming past a full-page report on the congressional scandals, an analysis of the upcoming elections in Egypt and a piece about the fruitless manhunt for the elusive "King of Hackers." There was an op-ed column titled "The Shame of Huandong." Gabrielle thought back to her conversation with Xena the other day. Could they, somehow, pick up their old life in today's world, fighting evil and war, defending the helpless? An eternity _of what_?

The train pulled into Seventy-Second Street. It wasn't her stop yet, but at the moment walking twelve blocks seemed like a better idea than sitting on the train and brooding. She rose so brusquely that the blue-haired lady gave her a startled look.

Outside, the city lived; the sky was a soft blue and the buildings on Broadway were bathed in the bright sunlight, and living forever felt almost right. Gabrielle stopped, letting the warm summer breeze caress her arms and ruffle her skirt. "Beautiful day, huh?" said a dark-haired bearded man in his thirties as he passed by; and suddenly, in the middle of the noisy street, Gabrielle felt completely alone. The sunlight seemed to fade, though the sky was still cloudless. As she crossed the street and walked uptown, she wondered if she would ever be able to take anyone else into her life. _And Xena…_ Ares was sure to try, once again, to persuade Xena to accept immortality. Would she agree this time, fearing that if she didn't Gabrielle would face an eternity alone? Her heart beat faster as she walked. She shouldn't have left Xena alone with Ares now, not without talking to Xena first - she couldn't let Xena do that for her -

Preoccupied and restless, Gabrielle almost missed her block. She stopped and took a deep breath, and told herself to get a grip. Xena knew what she was doing.

She heard the phone ring when she was opening the door and raced to get it, almost tripping on the rug.

"Hello, dear."

It wasn't Xena.

"Hi, Mom."

"How are you?"

"Uh - fine. _Fine_ ," she said again. "I just came back from Xe- from Lynn's. How's - everything with you?"

"Are you sure you're all right? You sound agitated."

And then she blurted out, "Something - really weird just happened."

She regretted it instantly. After a pause, her mother said, guardedly, "Oh?"

 _I'm immortal. Oh, and I was Gabrielle of Potadeia in a previous life. No way._

"I, uh - I just met this girl on the subway and - and she said she was sure knew me at Wellesley," she lied furiously, "and I - I didn't remember her at all." Her mother was clearly waiting for more, and she continued, "She said she was in my Homer seminar. E-except she thought my name was something else. Gabrielle," she added in a flash of inspiration.

"And that's all?" Her mother sounded both puzzled and relieved.

"Yeah." She felt flushed and sick with shame. "I don't know, mom - it just really freaked me out. Sorry."

"Really, dear, you're overreacting. It's perfectly normal for people to get mixed up about these sorts of things."

"Yeah … I'm sure you're right."

"Well, if you ask me, I think you're under a lot of stress," her mother said authoritatively. "What with that trip to Greece, and the Xena book - yes, I know, it's wonderful and exciting, but I think it's taking a lot out of you - and that accident, and those stupid people at the hospital - well, you know what I mean. You really should come out here for a while. The weather's beautiful, it's so much better than being cooped up in New York - "

Gabrielle promised to come over for the Fourth of July and stay a few days, and then they talked a bit about the book, and ("speaking of Xena," her mother added) about the _Amore e Guerra_ DVD that her parents had finally gotten to watch, and about the Renoir exhibition in Boston. Her mother mentioned, in a somewhat accusatory tone, that her ex-boyfriend Simon (the boy two doors away) had just been promoted to Northeast regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund, and she said, "Oh, that's nice." After she hung up, she wondered what she should do next. She walked aimlessly around the apartment, then sat down at her desk and turned on the computer and surfed the Internet for a while, only half-aware of what she was reading. She did an image search under "Xena and Gabrielle" and sat for a while staring at a 19th century painting that looked nothing like them, a statuesque, wild-haired, square-jawed Xena and a too-fragile dreamy Gabrielle.

Then, on an impulse she couldn't quite understand, she picked up the phone again and called Artie. He was at home, and overjoyed to hear her voice.

"Oh, nothing new - just spending a quiet afternoon at home, watching tennis - how's it going with you?"

"I feel bad," she said. "I never really got a chance to thank you."

"Oh - what for?"

"Taking me to the hospital back then. Looking out for me. Being a true friend."

After a brief silence he said, in a slightly stifled voice, "Really?"

"Yeah." And, just like that, she knew it. _A very old friend._ Gabrielle's eyes tingled, and it was a few moments before she could speak again. "Come on" - she managed to sound light-hearted - "let's go out to Edgar's Café. My treat."

He was briefly speechless, and then stammered out something incoherent that added up to "I'd love to"; a short while later they were having cappuccino and cake under the café's high, sloping orange ceiling with the Art Deco chandelier, Edgar Allan Poe gazing at them morosely from the painting on the wall. The conversation dragged and stumbled along, with Artie for some reason giving her a long and confusing synopsis of some horror movie he'd seen; and then, out of nowhere, she looked up at him and asked, "Artie, what would you do if you suddenly found out you were immortal?"

"Huh?" He stared, the fork with a piece of cheesecake frozen halfway to his mouth. "Immortal? Like, how?"

"I don't know … I mean, it doesn't matter. Like, if you had taken some pill and you didn't know about it at the time but then it turned out that it made you immortal."

He pondered this for a moment, a bright grin spreading across his face. "Hey, is this like - one of those ethics questions they've got in philosophy classes? I took one in college - a philosophy class, you know - it was only for my humanities requirement, but it turned out to be some really great stuff about, umm - the meaning of life and everything - anyway, the prof used to give us these questions, like if there was a ship going down or, or - a fire, and you could either save your best friend or a world-famous scientist who's, you know, about to find a cure for cancer - "

"It's not an ethics question," she said. "I'm just curious. Just - something I was reading about today."

"Oh. What if I found out I was immortal, huh? I guess I'd be a pretty happy camper, why not?"

"It wouldn't scare you? I mean, think about it. Living forever. Eternity."

"Well, maybe I wouldn't think of it like that," he said. "Just - living one day at a time, you know?"

 _One day at a time._ Maybe that was it. Suddenly, she felt light and happy, and she wanted to lean over and kiss Artie, who had gone back to polishing off his cheesecake.

"So," Artie said, his mouth half-full, "if you were on a ship and it was going down, who would you save? Your best friend or the world-famous scientist?"

x x x

"Here we are," Ares said.

And there they were; back in the temple where, two thousand years ago, he had held on to his last memories of her before sinking into the deathlike sleep of the gods; in the chamber where, on the mural, the Warrior Princess still rode in all her beauty.

Now, she stood there in the low shimmering torchlight he had willed into being; her body stiff, her hands clenched in front of her, her face chiseled and hard. Even in these clothes, the rough blue pants and the faded shirt, she was Xena. The torchlight wavered, making the shadows sway around her, and there was a fleeting, frightening thought that perhaps she was merely a creation of his will, a long-dead illusion.

"Show me," she said, her voice harsh and strange under the low ceiling of the vault. "I have to know."

Oh, it was her all right. She was angry over Gabrielle's little problem; angry at herself, and probably, deep down, at him. But Xena being pissed off at him was nothing he couldn't deal with. Just like old times.

"From God of War to water inspector. Talk about decline and f- "

She stopped him with a glare, and he raised his hand, directing his concentrated power at the stone slabs that sealed the crypt. The stone trembled, filling the chamber with a low vibration, and the doors began to slide apart, exposing the chilly blackness inside. Another wave of his hand dispelled the dark with a flare of crimson torchlight.

"I still got it." Ares grinned and turned toward Xena, and was startled to see the look on her face as she stared at him - tender, shocked, almost scared.

"Ares…" she whispered.

He understood. The crypt; what he'd done after losing her. Maybe the reality of it hadn't fully hit home for her until now.

He brushed his knuckles over her face. "Now - you don't want to go all sappy on me."

She gave him a small tense smile and said again, "Show me," her voice gentler this time.

Together, they walked through the doorway. There it was, the trickle of water from the rock, sparkling with reflections from the torches. With Xena standing next to him, Ares cupped his hand, gathering a tiny pool of water, and drank. A mortal might not have noticed the faint trace of that unique bittersweet tang.

"Yeah," he said. "Of course."

Her face hardly flinched. After a moment she said, "There's nothing you can do to take this away," a statement more than a question.

"What makes you think she wants me to? You've got scientists playing around with mice hoping they'll find some way to double the mortal lifespan. She has - "

"She has _no choice_! If she wanted you to take it away - could you?"

He shook his head.

She extended her hand and held it under the dripping water; and then, before he realized what was happening, she brought it to her mouth.

"What are you - ?"

He tried to grab her wrist, but she pushed him off, the palm of her other hand flattened against his chest, and it was like being back on that wreckage-littered beach and watching her drink death from a vial: _You can't stop me this time._ Only this time, she was drinking life, not death, and he didn't know why he would try to stop her - why it still felt as if he were losing her forever.

He seized Xena's arms and pulled her toward him, almost frantic. She opened her eyes; in the shadows, they were a deep gray, with tiny flickers of gold from the firelight.

"You tried to stop me…" she said, a touch of puzzlement in her voice.

He had no idea what to say. In the silence, he was acutely aware of the quiet hiss of the torches, the water's trickle - the hitch in Xena's breath - the beating of his own heart.

"It's what you wanted," she said, with no bitterness.

What he wanted. _I won't be myself anymore_ , she had told him once. He wasn't sure if he felt anything all, or too much at once to make any sense of it.

"Xena…" he said hoarsely.

She took his face in her hands and stopped him abruptly with a kiss.

x x x

Gabrielle had tried calling Xena four or five times; had paced around her apartment wondering if Xena was out with Ares - in some fortress if he still had any left, or in some Fifth Avenue penthouse with a sleek ultra-modern black interior, or in Rome for all she knew; had thought about eating ice cream and wondered if immortals could still get fat. Then the buzzer rang, and yes, it was Xena; waiting for her to come up, Gabrielle thought about what she was going to say. She had made peace with her fate… no, that sounded like she had resigned herself to a death sentence. She would be fine. She would just live her life one day at a time.

Only, after a short span of time, it would have to be life without Xena. She felt sick at the thought; somehow, until now, she had managed to keep it at bay.

There was a way, of course. But she wouldn't, _couldn't_ ask for that; couldn't even let Xena go ahead with it if Xena volunteered. Xena had never wanted immortality. Even for love - it was too much to ask.

She opened the door just in time to see Xena coming down the hallway, her step brisk, her determined expression softened by a touch of wistfulness.

"Xena, now listen - I've been thinking about this and - please don't blame yourself, okay? _Please_. And don't worry about me, I'll be fine, I - "

Xena stopped at the door, facing her. " _We'll_ be fine."

Something about the way she said it was unnerving.

"Xena - ?"

"Come on." Xena squeezed her shoulder. "You don't want to talk about this out here."

The door closed behind them with a dull thump, and then Gabrielle turned abruptly. "Xena, if you're thinking about - "

"I'm not."

"But - "

"Gabrielle. It's over."

" _What?_ "

"I'm immortal."

Gabrielle stood still, letting it sink in; but maybe she had known all along.

"Why?" she asked helplessly, already knowing the answer. Then another thought cut into her confusion. "Wait - did Ares - " Dimly, she knew that blaming Ares would be easier; easier to think that he had pushed Xena into this.

Xena made a vague motion with her head. "It was what I wanted." She smiled and looked almost happy; though there might have been tears in her eyes, or perhaps only in Gabrielle's own. "I'll always be here for you."

Then they were holding each other; and, her eyes half-lidded, Gabrielle felt Xena's lips touch her cheek. When they broke apart and she looked at Xena again, she was almost ready to believe that everything would fine.

After a moment she said, "I can't believe you did that. It's just…" She shook her head, speechless. "I had no right to ask - "

"You didn't ask." Xena put a hand on her arm. "It was my choice. Gabrielle… in our other… I mean, back _then_ \- you once told me your path was with me, no matter what. Well - _my_ path is with _you_."

Gabrielle fought back the warm rush of tears. "I wouldn't have traded my life with you for anything."

Xena nodded. "Neither would I."

Maybe there had been no other choice.

They looked at each other silently for a while, until finally, Gabrielle managed a grin. "You want some cherries?"

"Sure."

And so they sat on the living room couch and ate cherries; Gabrielle had put on a CD of _Rhapsody in Blue_ , and its soaring melody filled the room with its unique beauty of life and melancholy and joy.

"You know," Gabrielle said, "I've figured something out."

"Yeah?"

"I know it's kind of scary to think about eternity, but the thing is - you don't have to. You just - live your life one day at a time."

The rich, exuberant sound of music poured into the silence between them. "One day…" Xena murmured to herself pensively. Then she turned and grinned at Gabrielle. "Always the philosopher."

"But of course." Gabrielle grinned back at her.

After a moment's pause she said, "You know, I always used to think about all the books I'd never get a chance to read, the great art I'd never get to see…"

"So much culture, so little time?"

Gabrielle chuckled. "Yeah. Well, now I have all the time I could ever want. It feels … " she paused, wonderingly. "It feels - weird."

"Yeah."

"So. What did you do with Ares?"

Xena shot her a wry glance. "Oh - just dropped him off at NYU for a sensitivity training workshop."

"Ha, ha." Gabrielle elbowed her good-naturedly in the ribs, and was elbowed back.

"He's at my place," Xena said unflappably, as if talking about an ordinary boyfriend, not the God of War. "If he stays put."

"Great. You know, he'll probably redecorate your apartment in skulls and swords."

"Mm - I could host faculty parties. I bet it'd be popular. A statement about the brutality and meaninglessness of modern life, or something - "

"Or, more likely, he'll break your DVD player or - "

The music subsided, and over its softer chords Gabrielle heard the distinct sound of the doorbell.

"Huh. I wonder who that could be."

"Let's just hope it's not another god."

"Gods don't use doorbells."

Gabrielle put the disc on pause and went to get the door. It was Artie who announced himself from the other side, and when she opened he stood there holding a wriggling, whimpering ball of fluff, a golden retriever puppy so adorable that her "Oh my God!" was much too close to a squeal.

"Hey." Xena came up behind her. "What's this?"

"Not _what_!" Gabrielle gave her a teasing reproachful look. " _Who_."

"Oh hi, Lynn." Artie beamed at them both. "It's, well - he's - hold still - you see, Jasper's now a proud daddy and - " he patted the pup's fluffy head as it tried to flick its pink tongue over his hand - "I thought I'd get you one for your birthday. I know it's a little early - "

"Three and a half months early," Gabrielle said, moved and amused.

"Hey, who's counting, right? Aw, look at him - isn't he sweet. He's the runt of the litter - I figured you'd root for, you know, the underdog." He chuckled at his own joke. "You're smitten, aren't you? Now, don't deny it - "

Gabrielle smiled back at him. "Completely smitten. Thank you, Artie, that was - very sweet." Smitten indeed, she stroked the puppy's head, letting it nibble on her fingers, and then took it from Artie, the furry little body warm and so alive in her hands.

"Hey," he said, "maybe you can call him something from those Xena stories. You know, like Ares."

Gabrielle caught Xena's amused look and smirked as she lifted the puppy up, baby-fat paws splayed in the air. "Nooo, he doesn't really look like an Ares type to me. Anyway, don't you worry – I'll find him a good name." She hugged the puppy to her side, then said "Ow!" and laughed because it was chewing on her hair, and gave Artie an awkward one-armed hug, leaning against him as he gingerly put his arm around her shoulder.

"Well," she said. " _Now_ I have everything I need."

Xena gave her a questioning look; and, truth be told, she herself wasn't sure what she meant, only that she was happy.

x x x

She stood outside the door, key in hand; wondering if he was inside, and knowing deep down that she didn't need to wonder. It was the oddest thing, to think that they were together now, with was nothing to divide them - that she could walk into her apartment and expect, as a matter of course, to find him there.

And there he was, sprawled comfortably in her armchair, reading a book; the blaze of sunset in the window touched his hair with gold and gave a soft shine to the black of his leathers. He looked up when she came in, unsurprised, a twinkle of warmth in his eyes. As he closed the book, she saw that it was _Xena, Warrior Princess: Mystery, History, and Myth_ , the 1998 collection of essays which included her own highly acclaimed contribution, "Xena and Livia: A Historical Puzzle."

"Brushing up on your history," she said.

Ares tilted his head, one eyebrow raised slightly in quizzical amusement. "You still don't cut me any slack, do you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said; knowing full well, of course, that they both understood perfectly.

"Let's see… " he reopened the book and leafed through it nonchalantly, then pointed at the page. "In using Gabrielle's scrolls as a source, the historian encounters several major problems: the gaps in the record; unreliable copies of lost original scrolls; and, _of course_ "- he made the words drip with irony - "the need to separate facts from romantic fairy-tales about the gods."

She came up and stood over him, feeling a small, warm shiver of desire at the nearness of his body, at the way he gazed up at her, his lips parted slightly, his eyes suddenly intense. The book slid out of his hand and landed on the rug with a muffled thud.

"At least I said they were _romantic_ ," she said. "You should read Sally Lamierina's 'Ares in the Xena Scrolls: A Symbol of Phallic Power.'"

"Mmm." He ran his hands, slowly, up the sides of her legs, then rested them on her hips and pulled her closer. "That - doesn't sound so bad."

She lowered herself in his lap, straddling his legs, her hands on his shoulders. "It's bad," she said huskily, her eyes half-closed, leaning in toward him, hungry to taste his mouth. "Very" - her lips almost touching his - "very bad."

She gave him a quick, hot, teasing kiss and pulled away; and when she dove back he stopped her, his fingers at her lips, his eyes locked on hers.

"So," he said. "It never occurred to you that it could all be real. Must have been quite a shock."

That was, of course, an understatement. But somehow, Xena realized, the whirl of emotions she had felt then - disbelief, bewilderment, terror, confusion - no longer seemed quite real, as if _those_ were the memories from another life. It startled her for a moment; then, she put it aside.

"I thought I was crazy," she said. "Or dreaming."

"Still think so?" he asked quietly, his knuckles brushing her cheek.

"I don't care," she said, and leaned down to kiss him again.

x x x

The New York Times

October 15, 2005

Section: Arts and Ideas

A Trip to Greece Changes a Scholar's Career

By Liz Scott

 _Until recently, Lynn Doyle was a rising academic star. At 33, she was a full professor of history at New York University, with rumored offers of a position at Yale or Harvard. A much sought-after conference speaker and the author of numerous journal articles, she had landed an impressive book contract with a commercial publisher, Alfred P. Knopf, for a book on the life of Xena, the legendary "Warrior Princess" of Thrace. The book was eagerly anticipated by academics and lay history buffs alike as the first full-length Xena biography in over 30 years._

 _Then, two months ago, Dr. Doyle left it all behind._

 _Today, having given up her Manhattan apartment and her university job, she lives in Ilion, New York (population 8,612), in a house she recently bought. She has a horse. She doesn't mind that New York City is a three-hour drive away (much longer than that on horseback, she points out wryly). And while the Xena book is still in the works, with free-lance writer Jacqueline Lyons as Dr. Doyle's co-author, it has been revamped into a blend of history and fiction written as the joint memoirs of Xena and her chronicler and companion Gabrielle, the "Battling Bard of Potadeia." This book is now expected to incorporate, in addition to historical data and research, a lot of mythological embellishments that have always clung to Xena's story: for instance, the tales of the Warrior Princess's battles against the Olympian gods and their eventual downfall at her hands, and - ever popular with the romantic types - of Xena's tempestuous relationship with the god of war, Ares._

 _The irony of this turnabout escapes no one. Dr. Doyle, as her bewildered former colleagues and many former students will attest, has always been harshly critical of the tendency to mix scholarship with "romanticism" in Xena-related studies. As NYU history department chair Norah Kay Lefler put it, "A lot of us would just like to ask Lynn: What happened?"_

 _When the question is posed to Dr. Doyle, she shrugs. "I was drawn to the story of Xena ever since I was a child," she says. "And then at some point I began to wonder if I was trying to strip her story of all the things that made it so fascinating to people - including myself."_

 _Dr. Doyle is rather taciturn, not to say cagey, on the subject of her epiphany. She mentions only that she began to have doubts about the direction of her career on a trip to Greece with Ms. Lyons last May, to examine what is unquestionably the archeological find of this still-young century: a large stash of the original scrolls of Gabrielle of Potadeia. During our conversation, the renegade academic seemed far more interested in discussing her and Ms. Lyons's other joint project, the Huandong Rescue Committee dedicated to helping victims in the war-torn province._

 _Ms. Lyons, 27, seems a far better fit for the fictionalized biography of Xena she is now co-writing with Dr. Doyle. Her first book, "The Virgin of the Terror" (Random House, 2002), a biography of French Revolution heroine Charlotte Corday, enjoyed a commercial success but was harshly criticized by some scholars for romanticizing the material and placing a good yarn over factual accuracy; writing in The New Republic, historian Robert Sgriccia conceded that the book was "entertaining, even absorbing at times" but dismissed it as "the Harlequin Romance approach to history." Ms. Lyons is also the co-author, with Dr. Renee Ryan, of the current best-seller "No Pain, No Gain: How to Eat Like a Gourmet and Stay Fit."_

 _Ms. Lyons freely concedes that when she and Dr. Doyle first met, Dr. Doyle was somewhat skeptical of her approach. Both of them, however, strongly deny that the change in Dr. Doyle's outlook had anything to do with Ms. Lyons' influence._

 _On the subject of Dr. Doyle's transformation, Ms. Lyons is far more talkative than Dr. Doyle herself. "It was amazing," she says with unrestrained enthusiasm, recalling their trip to Macedonia. "We got to hold Gabrielle's actual scrolls in our hands. We saw Xena's chakram. We saw the excavations of a temple to Ares where Xena herself may once have stood before the altar. It was like touching living history - living myth. I think it was a turning point for Lynn, like a religious experience."_

 _This kind of talk, understandably, makes some of Dr. Doyle's former associates nervous. Anonymously, some have described her epiphany in such disparaging terms as "premature mid-life crisis." Others speculate that her decision to make her book a semi-fictional work was due at least partly to financial motives, including the prospects of optioning the movie and television rights. At NYU, in particular, there is considerable bitterness as well as consternation over her decision. These ill feelings are exacerbated by the fact that Dr. Doyle's bombshell resignation left the department scrambling to find a replacement to teach her Xena seminar in the fall term, when the class was filled to capacity due to publicity over the discovery of Gabrielle's scrolls. While Dr. Doyle expresses regret over letting her colleagues down, she is adamant that she could no longer teach the course with the perspective, and the detachment, it required._

 _About her bigger change of course, Dr. Doyle clearly has no regrets. "I am very proud of my career as a historian," she says. "I'm proud of the work I've done. Now I have reached a point in my life where I need something different." By that she means not only the book - scheduled for publication by the end of next year, with talk of movie rights - but also her activism on behalf of civil war victims in Huandong. (While the organization will have its official launch in January, it has already accomplished the minor miracle of getting Hollywood diva Venus Madison, the committee's honorary chair, involved in a social cause.) Says Dr. Doyle, "Jackie and I decided that if we're going to write about two people whose lives were dedicated to - as old-fashioned as it may sound - the greater good, we should try to practice what we write."_

 _Don't expect her, however, to take up the sword._

"Whyever not?"

Xena turned her head from the computer to look at Ares. He was lounging on the couch, bare-chested and in black pajama bottoms, a newspaper in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.

"Why not what?"

"Take up the sword." He flicked his finger at the newspaper.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you," she said, reaching for her own coffee mug. "Until they locked me up in the loony bin."

He chuckled and folded the newspaper, letting it drop to the floor.

"Well," he said, "that was interesting."

She watched him sip his coffee and smiled, because he looked so domestic right now; then she remembered Ares on a farm as a mortal man long, long ago, and a small sadness crept up inside her chest but dissipated quickly. She would be happy.

"Come here," he said.

"Not now," she said, half teasing, half meaning it. "I have things to do."

"You and your work."

She grinned at him. "You should get a job."

"Oh yeah." He put down his empty coffee mug and stretched. "Something in the international arms trade?"

"Very funny."

"Just don't expect me to follow in my sister's footsteps and be a movie star."

"Oh, I don't know." She rested her chin on her palm and smirked. "Maybe you'd get to use a sword…"

"And have flunkeys to fetch my coffee." He picked up the mug and waved it at her.

"I see the brew of soldiers' boots is growing on you."

"Well, like you said - " he held the cup and stared at it with half-lidded eyes, and in a moment it was filled to the brim with the hot dark liquid - "it builds up the fighting spirit."

Xena shook her head, smiling. "Who are you going to fight with?"

He shrugged. "You know what they say. For a true warrior, a fight is always just around the corner."

"Who says that? You?"

Before he could answer, there was a burst of faint barking from the outside, and the sound of the door opening and closing; the barking grew louder, accompanied by an excited tap-dance of light paws on the floor, and then Gabrielle's voice said, "Walter! Walter - stay!"

A moment later the dog bounded into the living room with a breathless "woof," full of gawky adolescent energy; he paused for a moment, then made a dash toward Ares, ears flopping and tail wagging, and rose up on his hind legs, digging his still-chubby front paws into Ares' knees. Xena laughed and shook her head.

"I see you're still popular with dogs."

"Get that mangy mutt off me," he growled in mock protest, patting the dog's head.

"Hey! Watch what you call my dog!"

Gabrielle came in hugging a paper bag with groceries, which she put down on a chair. "I got you muffins," she said to Xena, "good luck finding bagels in this wilderness. Walter - come here!"

Walter sprinted toward her, then toward Xena (who pretended to ignore him as usual, though she wasn't above slipping him treats when no one was looking); then he spun around and pranced back to Ares, finally coming to a rest at his feet.

"Looks like you have a rival," Xena said.

Gabrielle made a face at her. "So, you read the article?"

"I did." Xena raised an eyebrow. "A religious experience, huh?"

"Well, you kissed a god. In a temple."

"Somehow, I think that making out in a temple is not what people have in mind when they think of a religious experience."

Ares smirked at her. "Obviously, they never made out with _me_."

"So." Gabrielle came up behind Xena and put a hand on her shoulder, glancing at the computer screen where her latest book chapter was now up. "What are you doing?"

"Oh - just talking about how Ares should get a job."

Gabrielle laughed. "That'll be the day. Wait, maybe Ares can run a football team. You know that American football is just a glorified metaphor for war, right?"

"More like – a lame and boring metaphor for war," Ares said.

"Sure." Xena patted Gabrielle's hand. "And then you're going to start a committee to combat violence in team sports."

"There's an idea. Listen, all joking aside, we need to get some work done. I'm heading back to New York around two o'clock - having dinner with Artie."

"A date?" Xena said good-naturedly.

Gabrielle gave her a wrinkle-nosed grin. "I thought you didn't do girl talk."

"That was two thousand years ago."

"Hmm… Suddenly, I'm not so sure I'm going to like the new you."

"Oh yes you will. So? Is it a date?"

Gabrielle was about to say something, but Walter stirred, yelped and raced toward the French windows where he pawed agitatedly at the glass, his attention obviously riveted by something outside.

"Walter! Quiet," Gabrielle said, going over to the window. "Oh - it's just some squirrels."

"You should let him outside or we'll never get a moment's peace," Xena said. "I still can't believe you called the poor thing Walter. It's so dorky."

"Like you would know anything about doggy names." Gabrielle managed to pull Walter away from the window and leaned down, patting him on the scruff of the neck. "I told you - he's named after Walt Whitman. It just came to me when we were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I thought about his poem…"

"More poets," Ares said. "Figures."

"Hey, just be glad I didn't call him Matthew or Arnold," Gabrielle shot back; and, turning to Xena, "You know, for Matthew Arnold. Victorian poet. The one who wrote that 'Dover Beach' poem I read to you the other day, remember?" She smirked. "You liked it."

Xena remembered, and felt a strange hush inside. "Yes," she said. "I did."

Ares gave her an amused look. "That must be some poem."

Gabrielle stood up straight, her hands clasped in front of her, as if she were a performing bard at some ancient festival, the colors of a sunny autumn day behind her in the window like a backdrop; and then began to recite.

"Ah, love, let us be true  
To one another! for the world, which seems  
To lie before us like a land of dreams,  
So various, so beautiful, so new - "

Gradually, her voice dropped from a dramatic sing-song to a quiet, reflective, almost wondering tone, as if she herself had just been struck by the meaning of these lines.

" - Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,  
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;  
And we are here as on a darkling plain  
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,  
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Normally, Xena would have made a joke of this, and Ares would have ribbed Gabrielle about her passion for poetry. But this time, she didn't feel like joking; and Ares looked thoughtfully at Gabrielle and raised his coffee mug in a gallant, only slightly ironic gesture that could have been a toast or a salute.

x x x

The girl woke up with a jolt, and fidgeted a little; she could feel the hard ground underneath the blanket. She shivered and moved a little closer to her boyfriend, who was snoring quietly nearby. It had been a pretty dumb idea, she thought belatedly, to make a bet with the others in their group to spend a night in the Roman forum. It had seemed like a pretty cool thing to do on a semester abroad, and hiding among the ruins to stay after closing time had been a cinch, but now … well, it was uncomfortable and pretty chilly, even in a sweater and jacket. Besides, the place looked kind of eerie, away from the city lights; the curia was lit up with projectors but otherwise the forum was dark, except where the broken columns and battered statues were washed in milky moonlight.

The girl wondered groggily if it was some sound or movement that had startled her out of her sleep, or just lack of comfort. She closed her eyes, wrapped the blanket tightly around herself and resolved to try to sleep again.

This time, the sound was unmistakable - a strange "whoosh" that was definitely not a gust of wind. And then, a voice.

She lay still, fear coiling tightly inside her. _Dumb, dumb idea._

Finally, she worked up the courage to open her eyes. There they were, maybe thirty feet away, a man and a woman; there were flecks of moonlight gleaming in metallic studs on the man's vest, and in something at his belt that looked like … the hilt of a sword.

The girl felt herself breaking out in a sweat. Maybe it was a dream.

She nudged the boy a couple of times and, trying to make no noise, whispered, "Jason! Jason - wake up!"

"Huh? Mel?" The boy stirred; before he could say anything, the girl clamped a hand over his mouth.

"Look," she breathed into his ear, near-soundlessly. "Over there - do you see?"

He squinted and finally whispered back, "Yeah."

The man and the woman strolled away, arm in arm, their voices faintly audible but too distant to make out whatever they were saying. The girl breathed a little easier.

"Did you see that the guy had a sword?" she asked.

"Yeah, well, probably some kind of a replica. Don't worry - "

The boy stopped in mid-word because just then, the projector lights around the curia went out, and in spite of the moon and the distant lights of the city, the darkness seemed pitch-black for a moment. That was unnerving; and somehow, she felt certain that it had to do with those two people.

"What happened?" the girl whispered plaintively; but before the boy could say anything, the light was back - a different, warmer light that somehow felt more alive. Only those lights weren't just around the curia; now they were flickering all over the forum, in rows and in clusters, finally flaring up on a wall nearby. Torches, the girl realized. She had stopped wondering what was going on and just waited, numb, for whatever would happen next.

She saw the man and the woman again, standing in an open space that had probably been a temple once. The man said something and the woman laughed and shook her head; then he held out both hands, and the flame-lit air around her seemed to waver and part and turn smoky, and then to solidify into something else. She was now wearing a leather skirt and armor that gleamed gold in the torchlight. She looked herself over as if surprised, and then straightened up and reached behind her shoulder and drew a sword.

Then, just as suddenly, she spun around and swung her arm in a swift, graceful motion, and her sword met that of the man.

They moved in an intricate weave, charging, retreating, dodging right and left, spinning and leaping and kicking out like dancers; their swords slicing through the night air and clashing and making sparks fly. The girl was so terrified that she couldn't have moved if she wanted to; and yet some part of her also wanted this to go on.

"It's like a movie," the boy whispered next to her.

The girl wondered feebly if this could be a film shoot. But no, there were no cameras in sight and no crew; only those two.

Their peculiar dance brought them closer to where the girl was, and for a few moments she had a clear view of the woman's features, chiseled and beautiful, her eyes bright, lips parted slightly in a hint of a dangerous smile as she deftly blocked a thrust of the man's sword. As they circled each other, the girl got only a glimpse of his face; what she did see was that he and the woman moved as if they were one, mirrored in each other, each perfectly anticipating the other's moves.

There was a moment when it seemed as if the man was winning, and the woman only blocking his thrusts as she backed away toward a crumbled wall; she took a few steps back, her sword extended to hold him off, and when it seemed she had nowhere else to go, she sprinted forward and leaped, flying high in the air with a piercing, singing cry, vaulting over the man's head and landing behind him. She laughed exultantly as she charged him again, just in time for him to spin around and meet her sword.

On and on they fought, the torchlight gleaming in their dark leathers and in the metal of their swords. With a dazzling spin, she kicked the sword out of his hand, crying out in triumph; too soon because his boot caught her in the midsection, making her stagger back, and he snatched up his weapon in mid-flight with a harsh grunt and they continued.

And then, with their swords crossed and the tips of the blades nearly touching the ground, they stood still. Once again, they were close enough for the girl to see the woman's face. She was smiling. A gust of wind blew through the forum, making the flames of the torches quiver, swirling in the woman's long hair.

The man said something, and the woman answered, but the girl couldn't make out any words. Slowly, they moved closer to each other, their swords still crossed; and then he drew his left arm around her shoulder and pulled her toward him, and their lips met in a long kiss.

When they pulled apart, the woman said something again, her mouth almost at the man's ear; and the girl thought, with a fresh stab of fear, that they both glanced in her direction. If she lived through the night, she was going to kill Jason for talking her into that bet.

The man and the woman sheathed their swords and kissed again, their arms locked around each other, the woman's hand clutching at the man's neck. A pale blue light flared up around them and enveloped them, and when it dissolved in a burst of sparks, they were gone.

The torches went out all at once, and because the moon had hidden behind a cloud all that was left was the pitch-black night. A second later, the projectors lighting the curia went on again, and everything was as before, as if nothing had disturbed an ordinary quiet night on the ancient forum.

The girl sat up, her heart slowing down. When she took a deep breath, her throat hurt and there was a prickle of pain in her chest.

"Did we see that?" she said, her voice a raspy half-whisper.

The boy sat up next to her and coughed.

"I - guess so," he said hesitantly. "You okay?"

The girl took another breath. "Yeah."

They looked at each other in the near-dark, and then the boy said, "Whoa. The guys will think we're nuts if we tell them about this."

"We're not gonna tell them. They'll think we're making it up. I mean… ancient ghosts on the forum? Right."

"You think they were ghosts?"

"I don't know," the girl said. Now that her fear was receding, she somehow knew that they were incredibly lucky to have seen - whatever it was. If nothing else, it was one part of their trip that they would never forget.

They sat quietly for a moment. Then the boy said, as if echoing her thoughts, "They were awesome."

 **THE END**


End file.
